mammaummi^ 



'F BOOK^ 

"PHIUP WENDELL CRANNEU. 





Class .HSjL^^SI 



n. 



Bnnlr .L^Tb 



Coipghtl^?. 



GQEXRIGHT 0£POSm 



JUDSON TRAINING MANUALS 

FOR THE SCHOOL OF THE CHURCH 



EDITED BY 

W. EDWARD RAFFETYp Ph. D. 

HENRY EDWARD TRALLE, Th. D. 

WILLIAM E. CHALMERS. D. D. 



THE 

BOOK OF BOOKS 

HOW TO APPRECIATE THE BIBLE 



By 
PHILIP WENDELL CRANNELL, D. D. 

President Kansas City Theological Seminary 

Author of 

" Pocket Lessons," " Survival of the Unfit," 

** Old Testament Character Crises," etc. 



PHILADELPHIA 

THE JUDSON PRESS 

BOSTON CHICAGO ST. LOUIS LOS ANGELES 

KANSAS CITY SEATTLE TORONTO 






COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 

GILBERT N. BRINK, Secretary 



©CI.A68r>78n 



Printed in U. S. A. 



NOV 13 '22 



THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY 

DEDICATED 

TO 

Dr. W. EDWARD EAFFETY 

MY LONG-TIME ASSOCIATE 

NOW MY ^'editor-in-chief'* 

AT WHOSE SUGGESTION 

THESE CHAPTERS WERE WRITTEN 



EDITORS' FOREWORD 

This volume is one in a series of texts in religious 
education known as the " Judson Training Manuals for 
the School of the Church." 

These manuals are arranged in three groups, namely, 
general, departmental, and parent-training. The general 
group includes vital teaching, story-telling, church-school 
buildings, expression through worship, handwork, com- 
munity service, educational leadership, and kindred 
worth-while themes in the field of religious education. 

The departmental group covers courses for every de- 
partment of the school of the church — Cradle Roll, Be- 
ginners*, Primary, Junior, etc. The parent-training man- 
uals emphasize religion in the home, and the necessity 
for training for the God-given, heaven-blessed privilege 
of parenthood. 

It is the aim of these manuals to popularize the assured 
results of the best psychology and pedagogy, and to make 
them the willing and efficient servants of all workers in 
the school of the church. 

Both the editors and the writers want these books " to 
live where the people live,'' and to be of real value to 
those forward-looking folk destined to be the leaders in 
religious education. 



Editors^ Foreword 



To this end each course will be (1) simple in language; 
(2) accurate in statement; (3) sound in psychology; (4) 
vital in pedagogy; (5) concrete in treatment; (6) prac- 
tical in purpose; and (7) spiritual in tone. 

Doctor Crannell, author of this manual on " The 
Book of Books," knows how to appreciate the Bible and 
how to show others. He is a born teacher, with a most 
versatile pen. He puts his ripe scholarship at the service 
of all in these stimulating, wonderfully suggestive chap- 
ters. As a result of his years of mining in the " One 
Book " he lays at the reader's feet a " wealth of trea- 
sures." Especially is he anxious to enrich the lives of 
young people. Pastors, parents, Sunday school teachers, 
and all Christian workers, individually and in classes, 
will be not only grateful readers but also glad recom- 
menders of this valuable appreciation of " The Book of 

Books/' 

The Editors. 



AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

The object of this little book is twofold : to confirm in 
the mind of the Christian worker the idea he already has 
of the Bible's peerless place and power; and to suggest 
some of the ways in which it can be made to yield its 
rich treasures in his personal life and labors for Christ. 
With the Word of God, enthusiasm and appreciation will 
react on each other, and experience and use will deepen 
both. 

" Questions and Topics " at the end of each chapter 
will be found helpful in mastering the contents, and in 
suggesting practical reflections and discussions. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Timeless Book 13 

11. The Timely Book 19 

III. The Book Unique 26 

IV. The Book Progressive 32 

V. The Bible in Literature 38 

VI. The Bible as Literature 44 

VII. The Bible as Soul-Food 51 

VIII. The Bible Backbone 57 

IX. Bible Reading versus Bible Study 63 

X. The Part and the Whole 69 

XL Bible Translations 75 

XII. Why the Bible Is Hard 82 

XIII. Saturated Solutions 88 

XIV. Your Own Bible 94 

XV. An Expanding Bible 101 



CHAPTER I 
THE TIMELESS BOOK 

The Bible, like every other book, was the product of 
a certain period of time. It is a growth of heaven, but 
it is rooted in the soil of earth, and in its outward expres- 
sion is redolent of the characteristic qualities of its 
habitat. This it had to be, if it was to reach, appeal to, 
and affect the men and women of its race and time and 
clime, to whom it first came in the sixteen hundred years 
of its production. 

That race and clime are markedly distinct from those 
of the rest of the world, that time had very different 
characteristics from our own ; and we are separated from 
it by almost nineteen centuries, centuries which have seen 
the most tremendous changes in human knowledge, human 
civilization, the details of human life. 

And yet today, and everywhere, that book, breathing 
out in well-nigh every page the atmosphere of its Semitic 
authorship, and bearing the marks of the particular six- 
teen centuries of its birth, is the most contemporaneous 
book in the world ; it is not only a citizen of every coun- 
try, but also a contemporary of every class, of every date. 
It has always been so, from the day when Christianity 
began to give it currency and approach to the whole world 
of men, the one strictly up-to-date book, the latest word 
and news for humanity, everywhere and always timeless, 
in its appeal, its application, and its effect. Spite of its 

13 



14 The Book of Books 

Semitic tone and archaic time, it is fresh, new, power- 
ful, wherever it can fairly get in touch with the mind. 

Bible Never Grows Old 

What is the secret of this universal and ubiquitous 
contemporaneousness ? 

It has more than the timelessness of great literature, 
though it has that. Some literature leaps the national 
boundaries, and endures down the ages, by virtue of 
something magnificent in its thought, or universal in 
its appeal, or masterly in its construction, or charming 
or beautiful in its form, line, music. Very much of 
the Bible has all those claims. Many of its books are 
unsurpassed in every one of those qualities. But it is 
hyperbole to say that the best of other literature is 
timeless in any such sense as the Bible is. What other 
book among all the world's classics ever finds itself 
universally at home, accepted and eagerly devoured as 
the latest despatch from the central court of things, as 
this book does? We put them on our list of *' The 
Hundred Best " and on our " Five-foot Shelves." 
Our scholars, some few, read them con amove, our 
" highbrows '' read them for display, the aspiring read 
them with sweat of brow, and the mass of humanity 
leaves them on the shelves with mute and admiring, 
because expected, respect. Too many, it is true, do 
that with the Bible, but to some everywhere, to very 
many in the aggregate, to representative souls in every 
class in fact, it comes with a fresh appeal and power 
that has no flavor of the antique and the outgrown; 
it grips and grapples them at once, the most modern 
thing they get; the one real " Everyman's Library." 



The Timeless Book 15 

Nor is the reason of this timelessness simply that 
the Bible is the production, through a great and won- 
derful period, marked by great and wonderful experi- 
ences, of a great and wonderful people, the undoubted 
religious geniuses of all humanity, the Jewish race. 
Other great peoples have put forth virile and powerful 
religious literatures, but they could not save them 
from oblivion. They were great, but they are gone, 
and gone forever, or kept only in a museum. Great 
single religious utterances, how many have passed 
into forgetfulness. The Jews themselves, as the peo- 
ple, in any living sense, of that book, have passed. 
In so far as they have retained its outward body, hav- 
ing missed its soul, they are not contemporary; they 
are belated Pharisees. So far as they have missed 
both its outward form and its inner soul, they are 
belated Sadducees. One class has no power; the 
other has no approach. 

The Bible has perennial approach and appeal be- 
cause it possesses certain qualities of permanence in 
greater degree than any other literature does, and 
certain others of which no other literature really has 
any. 

God is the Theme 

It is the timeless book, evermore " up-to-date " and 
" down-to-the-minute," because it grapples with the 
theme which is not only the greatest of all themes, but 
which is also in itself timeless, an eternal subject, with 
eternal interest — God. Other books too deal with God, 
his existence, the problems of his character and action, 
but what other can be named which is so centered upon 



16 The Book of Books 

the thought of God, is so suffused with the conscious- 
ness of him, so soars into the heights of his presence and 
brings back such glorious results to the mind and spirit 
of man, as this book? 

Just so long as it is true that " Thou hast made us for 
thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee,'' 
just so long as we human satellites revolve around, and 
reach out to realize what binds us to, our central Sun, just 
so long the book of God will be the new book, the un- 
ending book, the timeless book. A{ 

The Bible's perennial interest comes also from the fact 
that it deals with the lesser, but always important and 
poignant, themes and questions which cluster around its 
one great ever-contemporaneous theme, those of man's 
relations to eternity, and to God, the God of might and 
right, of law and love. " If a man die, shall he live 
again ? " " How shall man that is born of a woman be 
just with his Maker? " " How shall I come and appear 
before God ? " " What shall I do to be saved ? " " Who 
shall deliver me from the body of this death?" *' Who 
shall ascend into the hill of the Lord ? " Other books 
may attract our attention for a time, with their passing 
questions, and then be blown away like the innumerable 
leaves that strew the autumnal brooks in Vallombrosa, 
but this book will come to generation after generation 
with unwaning power and hold, because it deals with no 
light and passing themes ; it grapples with the very things 
which men in their deepest moments most desire to know. 

Solves Man's Problems 

And It not only grapples with these questions, it gives 
confident and satisfying answer, from a thorough and 



The Timeless Book 17 

accurate knowledge of God and man. It is timeless be- 
cause the truths it utters are timeless, always true, always 
verifying themselves to the minds which fairly grasp 
them. It did not answer every detail of his inquiry, but 
it brought peace to the mind and heart of that Arabian 
Emir as he struggled with the problems of human virtue 
and suffering, and to the Preacher, as he sought some 
satisfying clue amid the distracting questions of life and 
death and human society. It filled with its peace the 
great questioning soul of Habakkuk, "the prophet of 
reasoned faith," in the midst of teasing doubt. It came 
to Saul of Tarsus, either in the written letter of the 
Old Testament, or the germinal truth of the New, which 
he felt to be one, and solved every problem of reason 
and conscience and spirit for him. And so with Augus- 
tine and Luther and Calvin and Jonathan Edwards and 
Gladstone and Romanes and Balfour, and souls like 
theirs, in all time and everywhere. It did this yesterday. 
It does today. To grapple with the deep, absorbing, lif e- 
and-death-involving problems is a great thing; to solve 
them is a greater ; the Bible does both ; and lives forever. 

But it does not solve them intellectually alone ; it solves 
them morally, spiritually, vitally, and it solves them with 
power. The Bible is timeless, because there timelessly 
works in it and through it the timeless power of Him 
with whom all things are *' one eternal now.'' One 
prophet saw a vision of an almond tree, and the message 
of the tree was, *' I watch over my word to perform it." 
Another perceived the eternal promise of God in the 
unending circulation of snow and rain, and understood 
that " my word shall not return to me void, but it shall 
accomplish that which I please, and shall prosper in the 

B 



18 The Book of Books 

thing whereto I sent it." But a greater Prophet than 
them all declared, " The words that I speak unto you, 
they are spirit and they are life/' In every age, every 
land, every century, from the beginning until now, God 
is using this book as the medium through which to send 
the life-giving pulses of his spiritual might. Given our 
faith, our application of it, our obedience, he never lets 
it fail. He honored it in the first century, incomplete, 
not yet fully formed. He honored it when flaming 
apostles of foreign missions carried it among the heathen 
in medieval time and down to our own day. He honored 
it in the seventies and eighties upon the Congo ; he honors 
it in India, Korea, Egypt, now. He honored it last year, 
last week, last night, as through its means he brought 
souls to salvation, healing, life. It knows no " statute of 
limitations " ; its potency never evaporates. Our faith 
may. Our zeal may. We may fail to apply it. But the 
God of eternity stands by it to send his power through it. 
The " two anointed ones " continually pour into it the 
exhaustless oil of light and life. It is as timeless as God. 

Questions and Topics 

1. How, and why, is the Bible a book of a '' particular 
clime and time " ? 

2. How can it be said to be " contemporaneous " ? 

3. How does it compare in this with all other books? 

4. Do its wonderful circumstances and wonderful peo- 
ple account for this? Why? 

5. What are the four great respects in which it is 
"timeless''? (Answer this in four sentences.) 

6. Why will it never be out-of-date? 



CHAPTER II 
THE TIMELY BOOK 

The Bible is timeless, dealing with a timeless theme, 
grappling timeless problems, uttering truths eternally 
valid and powerful, used to bring salvation in every age 
by a God who is " The Eternal Now." 

Being timeless, it should be timely. It was timely when 
it came, fitting its period, its people, its circumstances, as 
the glove the hand, or, better, as the key the lock. But 
times change. What precisely fits one man or age can- 
not fit another, precisely, at least. Though the Bible's 
formative principles and constructive substance are un- 
changingly right and potent, " enduring forever," do not 
its outer form and expression need to undergo some 
process to be adapted to any particular time, especially 
one so different from " Bible times " as ours ? Is not 
some adaptation of form necessary? 

Obviously. Left in the original Hebrew, Syriac, 
Greek, what message would the Bible convey, upon this 
world or any world, to an American " Twentieth Cen- 
tury " ear and mind ? It must be translated. And then ? 
It must undergo a certain process of " transposition," like 
a piece of music, all whose essentials are left unchanged, 
but which is put into a certain key to be played upon a 
certain instrument, into another to be played on another, 
but with no conflict, schism, or discord between the differ- 
ent " scores," each necessary to the full " rondure "of 

19 



20 The Book of Books 

the whole. Translated into English; transposed into 
"Twentieth Century." 

Can the Old be Timely? 

This will call, first, for our discovery, under the Ori- 
ental and ancient drapery, of the outlines of the timeless 
truth. Difficult and dangerous? True. But much more 
dangerous, and leading into infinitely more difficulties, 
would be not to discover under the drapery the truth. 
And the discovery is not so hard as it may look. Some 
knowledge of the laws of language, some acquaintance 
with the circumstances and the history, the ability and 
industry to compare Scripture with Scripture, especially 
to read the Old Testament in the light of the New, some 
testing and verifying religious experience of one's own, 
the promised enlightenment and guidance of the Holy 
Spirit, and a due proportion of mental independence and 
mental modesty, will enable anybody to see with reason- 
able clearness the main outlines of truth's real body under 
its foreign and changing garb. 

Then these eternal truths must be expressed in the 
present-day language, and, what in another phase is the 
same thing, must be applied to present-day facts and 
forces. At first sight this, too, would seem a very diffi- 
cult, even if an absolutely necessary, undertaking. 
*' They didn't know everything down in Judee." And 
surely not only the wording, but the shape of thought, 
needs much alteration to fit our time! What light on 
modern problems from a man who never saw a railroad, 
heard a telephone or phonograph (happy man!), never 
caught a wireless or beheld a modern factory ? Someone 
has proposed a new name for the phenomena of metals 



The Timely Book 21 

at the high temperature which the harnessed power of 
Niagara has made possible. They act very differently 
at that great heat from the ordinary ways we observe at 
common temperatures. He would call this new science 
of these new heatways, " Niagarics.'' " All laws," they 
say, " even the Ten Commandments, melt or bend in the 
Tropics." Job and David, even Paul — what can they 
from their clear Eastern air, their quiet life, their simple 
civilization, have to say to us in our smoke-clouded, fog- 
laden, complicated, machinery-mad, involved, modern 
life? The ethics of Jesus, can any "transposition" fit 
them to the complex and subtle facts, needs, problems of 
today? Timeless you say they are. Can they be made 
timely? 

Man's Inner Need the Same 

They must ; and they can. It is astonishing how little 
real change is needed. No essential outline has to be 
altered. 

Reading the Old Testament always in the light of the 
New, which is its complement, completion, and explana- 
tion, and understanding that its " shadows " and symbols 
have given place to the spiritual realities, what transla- 
tion or transposition is needed in the Bible's message 
concerning the inner spiritual life of man, his living re- 
lations with his Maker, his walk with God? Can any 
modern man need, or find, a secret of spiritual com- 
munion and power, deeper, higher, or of more present 
efficacy than, in culminating ascension, Abraham knew, 
or Moses, or Isaiah, or John-and-Paul, or Jesus ? Noth- 
ing has changed the inner heart and need of man, the 
inner heart and love of God, and the way to God remains 



22 The Book of Books 

the same, whether our feet have to find it in the clear, 
dry Syrian air, or the murky mists of modern Birming- 
hams, Manchesters, and Chicagos. When we sound anew 
the depths of the needs of the human heart we find that 
they are essentially the same as they were ages ago. 

Read into the Psalms, as God assuredly meant us to 
read into them, his fuller revelation through Jesus' life, 
his words, his cross, his tomb, his seat at God's right 
hand, and is there any demand of the devotional life of 
the Twentieth Century man which these outpourings of 
ancient Israel's deepest heart, its passionate longings 
after God, its paeans of rejoicing at his power and pres- 
ence, do not meet and express, with " mighty little trans- 
position," too? Those voices are the voices of every 
century, and most of all of ours, for we can understand 
them better, out of our varied experience. And while 
we would not, with a sister denomination, crowd back our 
Christian expression of the inner religious life into the 
" words of David," we would recognize that the loftiest, 
subtlest, most beautiful modern hymn simply expands, 
and in every note fully symphonizes with, those old strains 
of Israel's harp and voice. 

The intellectual message of the Bible for the religious 
life might seem to suffer most from possessing the char- 
acteristic marks of its particular age, like the passing 
books of " Christian Evidences " which each century 
floats on its rising tides and leaves stranded on its dried- 
up beaches. But even this needs no " transposition," for, 
marvelously, it hits with one shot the intellectual bull's- 
eyes by suggesting the one unfailing source and test of 
truth, that " faith " by which ** we understand," that 
"trustful and obedient reliance upon God" which en- 



The Timely Book 23 

ables us to " know God," not by the tedious processes of 
a laborious logic, but by the direct intuition of one who 
" knows God aright " because he has surrendered to Jesus 
Christ, and has '* tasted of the Lord that he is good." 
And every modern man who, out of the welter of doubt, 
finds God, finds him in just that, and in no other, way. 
Christ's prescription is still the master one : ** He that 
willeth to do his will, shall know." 

Fundamental Principles of Truth 

Nor, with all the complexities of modern life, is there 
need of any radical or considerable change, or any change, 
in the Bible's fundamental principles of individual mo- 
rality and individual prudence. Application, of course, 
more subtle and complex, but no alteration in the frame- 
work. One who took to heart the warnings of Proverbs 
and carried them into daily life would walk in absolute 
safety amid the whirlings belts and shafts and the moral 
barrages of our modern world. He who followed its 
words of prudence, industry, and thought fulness would 
find them leading to success today as much as ever. And 
he who would add to these the loftier outreaches of 
prophet, beatitude, and epistle as to the inner and more 
inclusive virtue of the spirit, manifest in the life, would 
be equipped for all conceivable modern needs. The Ten 
Commandments, the Multiplication Table, the Axioms, 
and the Beatitudes are never outgrown; they always 
apply. 

More marvelously, if possible, how our Book measures 
up to the great present demands in the field where man 
meets his fellow men in their corporate and associate 
capacities as constituents of society and as fellow makers 



24 The Book of Books 

of the kingdom of God! Have the methods of the 
exploiter, the industrial oppressor, the profiteer, changed 
in one atom of essential principle since Isaiah and Micah, 
Amos and Nehemiah? What voices come with clearer, 
more insistent, clarion-ring than those of these old 
Hebrew prophets, and of the greatest Hebrew prophet 
of all, our Prophet, Priest, and King, Jesus of Nazareth, 
the Son of God? Where will you find the wrongs of 
society more clearly, vigorously, poignantly dealt with, 
and the remedies more explicitly pointed out ? Shut your 
eyes: You forget all about Oriental robes and turbans 
and flowing beards. These are modern men talking to 
modern men about modern needs. In fact, our chief 
concern is not to bring the Hebrew prophets up to the 
Twentieth Century, but to bring the Twentieth Century 
up to the Hebrew prophets. The chiefest obstacle to the 
Bible's timeliness is not that it is behind the times, it is 
that it is so gloriously ahead of them ! But that is almost 
its chiefest service. 

In its method of finding God, in its message to the inner 
man, in its precepts of individual morality and wisdom, 
in its trumpet-call to social righteousness, and above all, 
in its offer of divine power to achieve all these things, 
the Bible is the one supreme " Tract for the Times," the 
timeliest book on earth. It has " come for (precisely) 
such a time as this." 

Questions and Topics 

1. What three things does the " Timeless Book " need 
to be '' The Timely Book "? 

2. Is the spiritual message of the Bible timely today? 

3. How can the Psalms be made Christian? 



The Timely Book 25 

4. What is the present validity of the Bible's moral 
precepts ? 

5. How do its social ideals and precepts compare with 
modern ideals and practice? 

6. Why is the Bible " the timeliest book on earth " ? 

7. If it is not, whose fault is it? 



CHAPTER III 
THE BOOK UNIQUE 

The Bible's uniqueness is not utter unlikeness to any 
other book. There are other very great sacred books. 
There can be no deep-gripping, far-reaching, wide- 
spreading, long-lasting religion without a book, or books, 
for definiteness, propaganda, power, and permanence. 
And a book is a book, appealing to men " bookwise,'* 
through words, thoughts, literary forms. If the Bible 
were absolutely different, it would, as far as we can 
imagine, have no approach to men, no platform of 
entrance. 

Nor is it that its various parts find no counterparts, 
congeners, elsewhere. Every Bible book can be classified 
— history, biography, law, poetry, and the like. Very 
fine specimens of all these can be found outside, other 
epistles than Paul's, other gospels than the New Testa- 
ment's, other philosophies than Job's, other great and 
glowing hymns than Psalms. Man's mind, heart, burning 
soul, have been at work outside the Bible stream of 
thought and aspiration, with some results that are very 
splendid. Majestic old Hindu, Babylonian, Egyptian 
hymns have come down to us, whose uplift to the soul 
we can but admire. Wonderful codes have survived 
from Egypt, Babylonia, China, India. The Bible's 
uniqueness needs no aid from the ignoring or deprecating 
other magnificent literatures of religion. Some people 
26 



The Book Unique 27 

are almost shocked to discover that others than Jews had 
grasped some conceptions of God, that other hearts than 
Christian had yearned after him, other voices sung his 
praises. But the Scripture itself testifies to this. " God 
has not left himself without witness *' even outside the 
chosen people, and '* the invisible things of him are 
clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are 
made/' 

How it is Different 

Nevertheless, the Bible is unique. This " mountain of 
the Lord's house," like Pike's Peak, dominates all the 
plain, stands out like Fujiyama's cameo-cone amid the 
landscape, and, like Everest, juts up higher than them 
all. Its uniqueness is the uniqueness of difference, of 
bulk, of superiority, of spirit, and, always, the unique- 
ness of power. One has simply to let it stand forth for 
a moment beside all other books, sacred or profane, and 
its total immeasurable supremacy appears. 

Yet may it not be that its supposed uniqueness is due 
to the fact that we have been taught to expect its unique- 
ness? Its superiority has been a dogma of our faith, 
such a pervasive and dominating element in our thinking. 
We find it unique because we have been taught that it is 
unique. But the dominating position the Book now holds 
it has won for itself ; it did not have it at the start. Book 
by book, over perhaps sixteen hundred years, it came 
into being, in the most diverse ways, in the most diverse 
circumstances, through many a contest, many a conflict; 
part by part it grew until it shaped itself into complete- 
ness, won ground inch by inch, at last convinced the world 
that it was one book, overawed the world with its supe- 



28 The Book of Books 

riority, with the sense of its divinity, till with Sir Walter 
on his death-bed, all who really know it exclaim, " What 
book ? There is only one book ! " 

That single parts of it surpass all others of their kind 
is no extravagant claim. There is nothing else that 
equals Job. The Sermon on the Mount has no fellow, 
nor the Twenty-third nor Nineteenth Psalm. Paul's 
letters, for logic, fire, and spiritual power, cannot be 
paralleled. Where can you match the majesty of Isaiah, 
the tender, passionate patriotism of Jeremiah? What 
could excel, or approach, the limpid profundity of First 
John, or the sublime picture drawn by the beloved disciple 
in his Gospel? Even those who class John's Revelation 
and Daniel's Visions with Jewish " Apocalyptic " are fain 
to acknowledge their supremacy in their class, their 
higher quality and spirit. And how thickly strewn in 
and through this book are these flashing gems ! Here is 
no " grain of wheat in a bushel of chaff " as in the other 
" sacred books," but crowded full. 

It is as a total more than in the single parts, however, 
that it stands out unique. In its lofty tone and spirit it 
overtowers. It gives, to be sure, the universal portrait 
of humanity. It paints mankind as Cromwell wished to 
be, '' warts and all." It leads us up to the brink of moral 
abysses where we shudder at the human possibilities of 
evil. But its descriptions of sins are warning light- 
houses, not beckoning beacons. Its total tone of lofty 
morality, Godward aspiration, divine outlook and invita- 
tion are equaled nowhere, and approached only by those 
books which draw their inspiration from its fonts. 

The uniqueness and superiority of the Bible are the more 
evident as we measure its influence upon other literatures. 



The Book Unique 29 

Its Power toi Stimxilate and Uplift 

And no other approaches it in its wide-spread, stimu- 
lating, upHfting power. Other books have dominated 
their milHons, sometimes their hundreds of millions. But 
what other has carried a gospel that has proved the power 
of God unto salvation, " to the Jew first and also to the 
Greek,'' out of every tribe, nation, kindred, tongue? 
There are Chinese books, Hindu books. Oriental books. 
This is the universal book, everywhere, in all climes, ages, 
peoples, gripping intellects, firing hearts, quickening spir- 
its, bringing deep and inner fellowship with God, fructi- 
fying lives into love, joy, usefulness. Other books tell a 
way to God which not all can find. This book tells the 
way, which any can. Other books describe a life; this 
book, by the grace that uses it, imparts the life. Other 
books touch only a part of human kind, only a part of the 
single man; this touches all sorts of men, and all the 
man. 

But its fundamental uniqueness lies in its unity; the 
fact of its unity, the essence of its unity, the source of 
its unity. 

Its unity is a fact, the unity of many parts in one 
whole. It is, of course, a library, as its original name, 
^^ Biblia (books)," implied — a national and ecclesiastical 
literature which has grown into its present shape by long, 
slow, varied accretions. But its name could not remain 
" Books " ; its essential unity forced itself upon the mind. 
Of all its varied sixty-six, there are but two or three 
which have not always overwhelmingly impressed them- 
selves on the religious consciousness as essential and in- 
tegral parts of the great whole, fitting logically, vitally, 



30 The Book of Books 

and helpfully into the living body of the word. And 
only a few believers have ever questioned even those. 
Ecclesiastes and the Song disclose useful, valuable, neces- 
sary aspects of the religious experience of daily life. 

Its Marvelous Unity 

The essence of the unity is its subject. When we come 
to ask why its books so ** hang together," so " consist," 
we discover that they all center around one thing, and 
that one thing centers in one Person. The thing is the re- 
demptive dealing of God with man. The Person is Jesus 
Christ. From the first chapters of Genesis to the last 
chapters of Revelation, it is the purpose of God for the 
education and salvation of the race that is being wrought 
out, and the Person through whom it is all to be achieved 
is our gracious Lord. This is clear from the first prom- 
ise of the " seed of the woman " in the garden to the last 
ecstatic answer on Patmos : " Come, Lord Jesus." No 
other book has any such personal unity, no other has that 
unity centering in one mighty Personality, ** the exact 
express of God's substance, the outraying of his glory." 
The Bible is the gathered literature of the Jewish race 
and the early Christian church, but this gathered litera- 
ture has grouped itself into a portrait, the portrait of 
Jesus. 

This fact reveals the Hand that made the book, the 
Source which makes its unity and its uniqueness. If 
" the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firma- 
ment showeth his handiwork," what does the putting of 
the Bible together into the unified portrait of Jesus Christ 
exhibit? A later chapter will speak of its progressiveness, 
the marvel of the divine leadership of men into the ad- 



The Book Unique 31 

vancing knowledge of himself. Here, the fact of the 
result is the wonder of the book, that it all falls into 
orderly lines and forms around its central dominating 
Subject. That the details should have been provided in 
such diverse ways, the experiences of men, the histories 
of peoples, the clash of civilizations, the sins of the evil 
and the good, the songs of psalmists and the visions of 
seers, and all this steadily through the lapse of the slow 
centuries, reveals one dominating purpose, one controlling 
will, one informing mind, one guiding, shaping hand. In 
their harmonious coworking, each in its place, the Bible 
books are like stars, 

" For ever singing as they shine, 
The Hand that made us is divine ! " 

This is the uniqueness of the Bible; it is the one, the 
only, book of God. 

Questions and Topics 

1. Wherein is the Bible not unique? 

2. Is its uniqueness simply in our thought? Why? 

3. How does it compare with other books, in its single 
parts ? 

4. How does it compare in tone and spirit? 

5. How does it differ in power? 

6. What is meant by (a) The fact of its unity; (b) 
The essence of its unity; (c) The Source of its unity? 

7. What is the supreme reason for its unity? 

8. Shall we call it a " library '' or a '' book " ? Why ? 



CHAPTER IV 
THE BOOK PROGRESSIVE 

The Bible has given us its own " formula," the " law " 
of its outworking life, the lines of its growth. " Holy 
men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy 
Spirit." " God, having of old time spoken unto the 
fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers 
manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us 
in his Son." It is the most progressive of books, a book 
of steady advance. Its advance is not progressive self- 
denial, the later contravening or abrogating the earlier, 
but successive and progressive self-realization, and self- 
clarification, the later bringing into clear, riper fulness the 
essence of the earlier. " I came not to destroy, but to 
fulfil — to (fill full)." Nor is its progress the mere evolu- 
tion of human discovery and perception through thought, 
struggle, suffering; it is the gradual unfolding of the 
truth as its percipient progresses to larger vision and 
deeper insight under God's developing hand. That is the 
book's own explanation of itself. It is neither rash asser- 
tion nor pious platitude to say that all its phenomena, 
all the observed relations between its earlier and later 
parts, unmistakably proclaim that glorious story. The 
Bible has not to undergo critical disintegration and re- 
construction to tell it, either. One need not, with some 
moderns, change the order of " the law and the 
prophets," insisting that the prophets came first and the 

32 



The Book Progressive 33 

law followed, to see the Bible's unfolding clarity of truth. 
Man's understanding of these truths did not always pro- 
gress, and in his obedience there was many a diversion 
and retrogression, many a shriveling up, many a back- 
sliding, like that between the glorious days of Sinai and 
the decadent days of the Judges and more than one 
other period. But such temporary atrophies and eddies 
in the tide are universally observable in human nature 
and human history, in every realm. They are the per- 
petual action and reaction of faulty human nerves, the 
systole and diastole of the imperfect human heart. And 
how marvelously the Guide led, not merely back into the 
old truth, but on to loftier heights than any before 
attained ! 

Necessarily an Advancing Revelation 

That the Bible must needs be a progressive book, an 
advancing revelation; that its truths could not come as 
one splendid sunburst, but as the dawning light which 
groweth more and more unto the perfect day, profoundly 
accords with two great facts of human nature. One, that 
the mind of man must approach great thoughts progres- 
sively, if it is to grasp them at all ; must be prepared by 
each stage for the one that follows. In the kingdom of 
truths also, " first the blade, then the ear, then the full 
corn in the ear." '' I have many things to tell you, but 
ye cannot bear them now.'' " He . . . will guide you into 
all the truth." And as with the human recipients, so with 
the human transmitters ; no one of them could convey all 
the truth, or every phase, or the full size, of any one 
truth, any more than glass of any one color can transmit 
the full white light ; only by the successive contributions 
c 



34 The Book of Books 

of many men can God's great picture be painted. A pro- 
gressive revelation is the only revelation possible. 

The thoughtful student sees at once the advance in the 
New Testament as compared with the Old; and looking 
further, he sees within each the same steady forward 
movement; progress everywhere. 

There is progress in the basic conceptions of human 
life and duty. Always, from beginning to end, high ideals 
of righteousness, purity, fulness are held up, and far back 
in the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy, for example, the 
spirituality of God's true service is gloriously emphasized. 
Always love of, obedience to, alignment with Almighty 
God are made the foundation and the summit of human 
virtue. But how the concept advances, brought out more 
and more clearly, definitely, with more and more of 
throbbing force, till you have the wonderful teachings of 
the Sermon on the Mount, and see how deep, high, spirit- 
ual, how all-inclusive, how searching, how filled with 
pulsing life is the ideal human character. And how that 
incomparable " blank," that outline drawn by the Master, 
is filled out, deepened, heightened, vitalized, as the dis- 
pensation of the Spirit begins at Pentecost, and through 
the life of the church and the writings of the apostles, he 
sets before us the Spirit-filled Christian, in all his possi- 
bilities of likeness to Christ, oneness with God, and 
blessed, life-transmitting power with men! 

God's People Grow 

The conception of the place and work of God's people 
grows, likewise. All the later development is implicit in 
the beginning. Abraham's call is not only to be a great 
nation, but that in him should all the families of the earth 



The Book Progressive 35 

be blessed. That germinal idea steadily grew, the con- 
ception of religion as being national to Israel, which in 
God's economy of progress it had to be, and was, broad- 
ened out by the message of prophet after prophet, the 
teaching of experience after experience, by Jonah and 
Micah and Isaiah, till you have the Great Commission 
for all the world, and Paul's splendid release of Chris- 
tianity into the large spaces where there is neither Jew 
nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but 
Christ is all and in all ; and at last, the Revelator's blood- 
washed " multitude that no man could number, out of 
every tribe and nation, kindred, tongue, and people." 

The conception of God himself grew in clarity, depth, 
breadth, quality. The Bible itself gives us no warrant 
for believing that the first clear Old Testament concep- 
tion of God was that of the Kenite tribal god, Yahweh, 
adopted by the Israelites as their own. On the contrary, 
from the first there was the majestic thought of him as 
the creator and upholder of all, disposer of destinies, 
director of all history, the Holy, the Only. But steadily, 
each event, each spokesman, adding his contribution, the 
Covenant-God's " self-affirming purity," and purity-de- 
manding will, loomed up in larger outline, and clearer 
contour, into Isaiah's awe-inspiring, spirit-subduing 
" Holy One of Israel." Amos and Micah added their 
quota in their emphasis on his ethical demand. Hosea 
deepened the thrill of his tender, forgiving love. Eze- 
kiel and Jeremiah gave other aspects of his grace toward 
persons as well as peoples. At last the whole revelation 
through prophet, priest, king, martjT, nation, culminated 
in the supreme conception, more massive, more inclusive, 
more tender, more human, than the " Jehovah " of the 



36 The Book of Books 

Old Testament (wonderful in these ways as he is) in 
Jesus' revelation of '' Our Father in heaven/' " the Father 
of spirits," " the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." 

Expanding Portrait of Christ 

The expanding portrait of Christ himself is perhaps the 
most striking of all. Take the prophetic picture. From 
the vague but glorious announcement in the garden of a 
coming conqueror of the Evil One, down through succes- 
sive f oreshadowings of a Redeemer, from the first prom- 
ises to Abraham of blessing through his seed, to the 
choice of one people, from the narrowing down to a se- 
lected tribe and house, from the conception of Israel's 
remnant, to and through whom the deliverance should 
come, the picture, clarified by various touches, heads up 
into Isaiah's matchless " Servant of Jehovah," fulfilled by 
no prophet, priest, nor king, nor by Israel herself, but 
only by Jesus Christ, who not only equals but surpasses 
its every feature. Alongside of that prophetic picture put 
the historic portrait. Note how the apostles' idea of their 
Master grew. They saw him first as the Great and Good, 
the Sent of God, the Anointed, the beloved Teacher and 
Miracle-worker. Little by little they felt they were com- 
ing into touch with qualities, powers, inner forces, more 
than human. Little by little he became unassignable to 
any category their experience had ever known. They 
grew to expect in him insight into their hearts' profound- 
est depths, control over minutest or vastest facts and 
forces, unmeasured readiness for every demand, every 
situation. For three days their conception suffered eclipse 
from the awful crucifixion, the overwhelming entomb- 
ment; but with the *' infallible proofs" of the Resurrec- 



The Book Progressive 37 

tion, Ascension, Pentecost, it burst into noontide splendor, 
never to be dimmed : '' My Lord and my God ! '' Thence 
the high note is carried through gospel, epistle, revela- 
tion, in expanding praises, to '' the Word (who) Became 
Flesh and Dwelt among us,'' to " the Exact Express of 
his Essence, the Effulgence of his Glory," to '' the Alpha 
and the Omega, the First and the Last," '' Who Is, and 
Was, and Is to Come, the Living One." 

There the book reaches its summit. We cannot pro- 
gress beyond it, but how we shall progress within it, as by 
faith and love and work we advance into an ever-increas- 
ing realization of him, " following on to know the 
Lord"! 

Questions and Topics 

1. Give the Bible's description of itself. 

2. What sort of progress does the Bible make? 

3. Why should it progress? 

4. Explain (three sentences) the progress in the con- 
ception of religion. 

5. Explain (three or four sentences) the progress in 
the conception of God's people. 

6. In its descriptions of God (three or four sentences). 

7. In its descriptions of the Redeemer (three or four 
sentences). 

8. In what way can we, and the Bible, now progress? 



CHAPTER V 
THE BIBLE IN LITERATURE 

Suppose one could apply some kind of an " exhaust- 
ing " instrument to the literature of the past fifteen cen- 
turies, or five, and '' suck " out everything, word, thought, 
suggestion, quotation, which it owed, directly or indi- 
rectly, to the Bible! What a shrinkage, crackage, de- 
struction! Many of the most magnificent productions 
would vanish at a touch, and *' leave not a wrack be- 
hind '' ; many others would shrivel beyond recognition ; 
others would be seamed, pitted, by wrinkles, holes, 
chasms, where once had gleamed their choicest beauties; 
and over others still, once throbbing with vitality and 
replete with spiritual fragrance, would steal the dull, cold 
gray of death ; the losses would be simply incalculable. 

As Producer and Inspirer 

The Book's prepotent touch is seen in the literature 
it has directly produced, for explanation, exposition, ap- 
plication, attack, or defense. No other subject, not 
Goethe, not Shakespeare, not Milton, not political econo- 
my, not chemistry, has directly given rise to such a flood 
of uttered thought. In any comprehensive library the 
books thus generated would, like the bank-clearings of 
New York City, mountainously outbulk any other com- 
bination, and come not far from outbulking all. Widen- 
ing human horizons in recent decades will reduce this 
38 



The Bible in Literature 39 

proportion, but this biblical literature will continue to be, 
like the yacht America, '' first, and the rest (compara- 
tively) nowhere." Most of these commentaries, theolo- 
gies, controversies, would not be called '' literature," a 
word which should be saved for productions marked by 
genius of construction and beauty of form ; and yet many 
of them, like Augustine's " City of God " or " Confes- 
sions," or the sermons of Bossuet, deserve as definite a 
place within " the literature of power " as any poem of 
Schiller or novel of Hugo. 

Add to this literature created the vaster and in a way 
nobler literature inspired. Nothing mightier than Dante's 
Divina Commedia, and the Bible inspired that. Milton 
is not second; in some respects he is loftier, and his 
greatest, " Paradise Lost, and Regained," with many 
others of his, derive motive and material, life and sub- 
stance, from the Bible. The early European drama was 
the Bible's " grandchild." The noblest allegory in any 
language, " Pilgrim's Progress," is absolutely bom of the 
Bible. A catalogue of " Bible-breathed " works of other 
authors would be a catalogue of the best in all modem 
literature. 

Still vaster is the literature it has enriched with noble 
character, lofty and pregnant illustration, telling figures, 
suggestive reference. The literary heavens of the last 
five centuries are studded with these stars. Almost every 
page of Shakespeare gleams with them. Not only the 
picture of 

Those holy fields 

Over whose acres walked those blessed feet 
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed 
For our advantage on the bitter cross 



40 The Booh of Boohs 

lives before us, but the great outline of truths and char- 
acters. In other Elizabethans they glow likewise. And 
so down the long list. Where would Lowell be, for in- 
spiration and for suggestion, if not for the Bible? And 
where Tennyson, Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant, Lanier, 
and many another later poet, essayist, creator? And 
Robert Browning, mightiest modern of them all, what an 
irreparable loss to his crowded, pregnant pages, if these 
were gone ! 

The Bible's Indirect Influence 

The field is still broader, the world of literature on 
which the Bible has put its molding, modifying (to 
" mix '' the metaphor) ; flavoring hand. Someone, whom 
I greatly envy, is going to have the time and the equip- 
ment to take a few *^ cross-sections '' of humanity's mind 
and heart on the great subjects which have concerned us, 
what men have thought and felt on God and human fel- 
lowship, and the soul, and right, and duty, and the rela- 
tions of men and women. 

He will take such a cross-section in Rameses' time 
and day, and Aristotle's, and Caesar's, and Constantine's, 
and Charlemagne's, and Luther's, and ours. He will get 
his cross-section from laws, oratory, politics, war, but 
especially literature ; for in many ways literature is a far 
more genuine and accurate expression of real life than 
ecclesiasticism or law or even war. 

He will understand that literature, like everything else, 
has eddies and swirls and passing ruffling " squalls " 
which sometimes hide the main currents and mislead us 
for a little as to the set of the tide. But allowing for 
that, he will see a wonderful thing. He will see that 



The Bible in Literature 41 

the thoughts of men have been transformed at their 
depths. 

In spite of the recent teaching and aims of Huns and 
others, in spite of wild ebulHtions of raw and inept think- 
ers, and the risings of certain sins which we have always 
with us, one set of ideas, one habit of thought, one atti- 
tude of mind, have been capturing the world; they are 
dominating all our thought and feeling, as is proved by 
our breathless, incredulous horror when the Hun denies 
them. They are the principles and attitudes and thought 
habits of Jesus Christ. They have not gripped us entirely 
yet. Practice lags far behind principle and precept, but 
today, after all the fiery and hellish outburst of the war, 
more truly even than when Whittier wrote it first : 

O Lord and Master of us all, 

Whate'er our name or sign, 
We own thy sway, we hear thy call, 

We test our lives by thine. 

The Flavoring of Literature 

You could no more mistake the flavor of the literature 
of this epoch, barring " nasty little habits '' of surviving 
paganism here and there, for the literature of Greece or 
Rome, even with your eyes shut, than you could confuse 
Paul's thirteenth of First Corinthians with Shakespeare's 
sonnets. And if the reason for this permeation of litera- 
ture in spite of itself with the Christian ideals and spirit, 
imperfectly apprehended and applied as they are, is 
sought, more than to any other one thing it may be traced 
to the steady, quiet, all pervasive influence of the one 
Book, which has been surrounding the mind of man with 



42 The Book of Books 

its blessed atmosphere, exerting its potent pressure, push, 
and pull, filling all literature with itself. 

A survey of the Bible in literature gives a new appre- 
hension and appreciation of the Bible. That it should so 
have molded and interpenetrated the world's mind testi- 
fies not only to the power of its thought and to the divine 
power behind it, but also to its literary charm and force 
and finer quality. 

So inwoven are the two, that familiarity with the Bible 
is absolutely indispensable to the appreciation of the 
literature. So thickly studded is the latter with the 
biblical allusions that its profusion of riches, its finer 
beauties, its subtlest or strongest touches, will be unper- 
ceived by the mind to whom the Bible is a stranger. 
Some years ago a number of college and other classes 
were tested with a rich chaplet of the choicest and most 
familiar scriptural allusions in well-known poets. The 
results were appalling. There were no perfect scores, and 
most fell ignominiously over the stumbling-block of their 
own crass ignorance. Richest beauties appealed in vain 
to eyes that could not see. Since then biblical depart- 
ments have been founded in many colleges and conditions 
may be better, but there is a long way to go yet before 
our young people will be equipped to understand either 
the Bible or the literature. 

Is it irrelevant to say also that another reason for in- 
tensive Bible study is that we may not only have the eye 
to see the biblical beauties in our great books, but also 
that we may be armed with standards of esthetic and 
moral taste, and equipped with a trained literary and 
moral judgment, which will unhesitatingly reject any 
literature which does not conform to Bible standards, or 



The Bible in Literature 43 

is not consistent with Bible ideals and principles ? Touch 
that novel, that poem, that essay, with your one touch- 
stone, God's word. Is it hostile, or divergent, or even 
merely negative? Out with it. It is brass, even if it be 
not virus; its rust will eat as doth a canker. There is 
enough literature that will stand the test. Let the 
other go. 

Questions and Topics 

1. What would happen to the world's best literature if 
the Bible were " sucked " out of it ? 

2. What can be said as to the books of Bible explana- 
tion ? 

3. Name some great " Bible-inspired " books. 

4. What would the cross-sections of human thinking 
show ? 

5. What lamentable effect upon the study of literature 
would Bible neglect bring? 

6. What " touchstones " will Bible study give us ? 

7. How shall familiarity with the Bible be increased ? 



CHAPTER VI 
THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 

We study the Bible, primarily, not because it is litera- 
ture, but because it is God's word, his message to the 
soul, storehouse of spiritual food, armory of spiritual 
weapons, clinic to teach us dealing with sick souls, our 
own guide to spiritual power, because it is our guide to 
him. 

Nevertheless, the study of the Bible as literature is of 
the greatest advantage. 

It yields us genuine enjoyment, high and helpful, and 
much enrichment for mind and ' feeling, imparting an 
increasing delicacy of discernment, a refinement of per- 
ception, not only fraught with pleasure of the finer sort, 
but also ministering to spiritual consistency and spirit- 
ual insight — " eye-food " indeed. It means increased ap- 
preciation of the book, the heightening and deepening of 
real respect. We see more and more that the form is 
worthy of the substance. We had not known how beau- 
tiful it really is. Look at a slice of cobblestone under the 
microscope, and one will see crystalline beauties unsus- 
pected before. Examine under the same microscope the 
sting of a bee and the point of the finest, most exquisitely 
polished needle, and one exclaims in wonder, " What hath 
God wrought ! " so gloriously perfect is that smooth and 
shining shaft beside the poor and jagged product of 
man's clumsy hand. Appreciative study of many a por- 
44 



The Bible as Literature 45 

tion of God's word will call forth the same exclamation, 
as its masterfulness, charm, finish, soaring imagination, 
force themselves on our awakened attention. 

Its Wide and Varied Range 

The paramount reason, however, is none of these, but 
better understanding, completer comprehension, truer 
interpretation. He who does not perceive that the Bible 
is literature, and of a wide and varied range, may indeed 
find the way of salvation, which has been made so plain 
that wayfaring men, yea fools, need not err therein, but 
he will miss many a fine point of meaning, will ludi- 
crously, or pitifully, or perilously, misunderstand many a 
passage, and will not only go astray himself, but will 
unwittingly deceive many who trust his guidance. If a 
study of church history would do away with half the 
denominations, then the ability to recognize and appraise 
different literary forms in the Bible would shut out half 
the bigotries, crankinesses, and heresies. To interpret 
the rich Oriental imagery of many portions of the Bible 
as if they were the precise, prosaic definitions of a dic- 
tionary, the dicta of a law book, or the demonstrations of 
a geometry, is to expose ourselves to the errors of the 
literalist who insists that the Red Sea was actually frozen 
into solid walls of ice, or of the radical who asserts that 
Isaiah and Hosea and Amos question the divine origin of 
the sacrifices. A little attention to Hebrew paradox, 
hyperbole, and antithesis would have saved both. God 
chose to put this revelation through the minds, voices, 
pens of men, into various literary forms ; he had himself 
so constructed the human mind that these are the ways 
in which truth and feeling naturally come from them and 



46 The Book of Books 

to them ; and he uses the avenues of approach, the gates 
of entrance, he himself has made. It behooves us who 
would get his message, to know what particular method, 
in any given instance, he is employing. 

Variety of Literary Form 

Its variety of literary form is wide. We begin at 
Genesis with biographical narrative, after the stately, 
pregnant Creation story; some would say, with folk- 
lore, but that is precarious ground for the Christian be- 
liever ; we go on to history in the rest of the Pentateuch, 
some of the prophets, and other historical books of the 
two Testaments. 

Law begins in the Pentateuch, and is elsewhere found. 
Job presents us " epic " poetry, of a reflective, dramatic 
type. The devotional and lyric poetry of the Psalms is 
followed by the sententious, pithy, epigrammatic, " phil- 
osophical " type in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. 

A highly wrought, imaginative, passionate series of 
dramatic lyrics is the Song of Solomon, which no inter- 
preter perhaps has understood too literally, though some 
have erred in the opposite direction of overspiritualizing. 

In the prophets, prose, sometimes, as in Haggai, quite 
prosaic, often, as in Isaiah, rises to thought and language 
so lofty, beautiful, passionate, rhythmical, that it can 
hardly be distinguished from poetry, and often cannot 
be, for it has risen on wings of imagination and passion 
into the upper air of pure poetry. 

Elegiac poetry, the poetry of grief and mourning, 
greets us in Lamentations, and scattered pieces here and 
there. " Apocalyptic " prophecy, dealing, amid human 
distresses, with human heroisms and divine deliverances, 



The Bible as Literature 47 

appears in Daniel, Zechariah, Revelation, and smaller por- 
tions. Some of this takes the form of imaginative writ- 
ing, in which great religious and spiritual truths are 
clothed, not in beautiful, ideal pictures, as in Isaiah, but 
in formal symbols, composite living creatures, wheels, 
eyes, heads, horns, drawn swords, actually resembling 
nothing that ever was in land or sea, but conveying in 
the various parts and relations certain spiritual ideas. 
The New Testament adds still another form, the in- 
structive or hortatory letter, ordered and elaborate, like 
Romans, Corinthians, Hebrews, or brief, struck out in 
the white heat of the apostle's response to some passing 
need of a church, like Philippians, or, more intimate still, 
the loving Christian message to an individual, informal, 
unstudied, warm with the flavor, the heart throb, the 
vitality of personal love, like Philemon, John II, and 
John III. 

Many other, or minor, forms, oratory, epigram, dia- 
logue, hyperbole, sarcasm, metaphor, antithesis, are 
found scattered in rich profusion. Allegory? Yes, very 
clearly, as in chapters of Ezekiel and sayings of Christ: 
" I am the Door." But very sparingly. He who assumes 
that any large portion of Scripture is allegorical will find 
himself on a trackless, uncharted sea, with no guide but 
his imagination and his theory. 

Fiction ? The parables, with a few possible exceptions, 
evidently do not relate actual occurrences ; they illustrate 
great principles, " earthly stories with a heavenly mean- 
ing," which character they proclaim on the very face of 
them. But he, again, who, outside of evident parables or 
allegories, feels that any professed historical Bible book 
is not sober history, who makes of the story of Joseph a 



48 The Book of Books 

bit of romantic folk-lore, or of Jonah and Daniel pious 
religious novelettes, is '' shingling out on to the fog " of 
uncertainty and conjecture, " sawing off the limb '' of 
Bible veracity which will give him or his followers a 
great fall some day. 

Its Rank as Literature 

What of the Bible's rank as literature? Naturally, it 
contains every degree of literary finish, according as the 
particular purpose of God and the sort of instruments he 
used at any time dictated. And, as its writers were all 
Semites, or, like Luke, in their writing strongly under 
Semitic influence, it is mostly of the free, vital, unelabo- 
rated type, though careful study will reveal much unsus- 
pected elaboration, as in the skilfully wrought structure 
of John's Gospel and Revelation. 

But in the various forms it does use, it is unsurpassed. 
Oratory of the simple, persuasive, " man to man '' sort ? 
Read Judah's speech before Joseph, pleading for Benja- 
min. Public oratory, rising to sublimest flights of imagi- 
nation, fired by passion, clothed in majestic figures, 
winged words? Read Isaiah, Habakkuk. Simple narra- 
tive and description, conveying without one needless 
stroke, a picture of unequal graphicness, most touching 
pathos, most penetrating insight into character? Read 
that same story of Joseph. Epigram-picturing and punc- 
turing with one thrust? 

Go to the Proverbs, and supremely to the parables and 
other sayings of Jesus. Lofty, strenuous manly grapple 
with the highest themes, pursued on bold wing, bodied in 
language of unmatched sublimity? Sit with the Arabian 
Emir, as Job wrestles with the mystery of the afflictions 



The Bible as Literature 49 

whose reasons he cannot understand. " Though he slay 
me, yet will I trust him." Literary construction, each 
part close knit, dovetailed, with what goes before and 
after, with skilful anticipations and denouements after the 
best manner of WilHam Shakespeare or modern novelist? 
Read Hebrews, with its philosophic calm yet burning ear- 
nestness, its ordered march, triumphant conclusions, close 
knit articulations, a coat of chain mail fitting its thought 
like a glove, without a weakening chink at a single point. 
What is the Bible's most noticeable literary quality? 
Pith, point, pungency, poignancy, picturesqueness, polish? 
All these. But more than these, timeless vigor, power, 
vitality. It is alive with the strenuous pulse of the 
human life, mind, heart, but most of all with the unerring 
wisdom of God, his piercing truth, his throbbing heart. 
With all the simplicity of many of its parts, its fluid, vital 
freedom, its limpid clearness, you have no shapeless lump, 
no poor, ill-wrought tool, but the gleaming, iridescent 
garment of the truth of God, the glittering, shining, pierc- 
ing sword of the Spirit, polished, fluted, arabesqued, 
whose very ornament gives it penetrating power and 
draws the blood. " Give me that ; there is none like it/' 

Questions and Topics 

1. What is the chief reason for Bible study? 

2. What two splendid results will its literary study 
yield ? 

3. From what will it save us? 

4. Name six dififerent literary forms in the Bible. 

5. What shall we feel about " fiction " in the Bible? 

6. Name some literary forms in which the Bible is 
unsurpassed. 

D 



50 The Book of Books 

7. Name the " seven P's " of the Bible's quality. 

8. What is the Bible? (See the last sentences in the 
chapter.) 

9. Why is its literary preeminence not more appre- 
ciated ? 

10. Is there any danger that literary study may lessen 
spiritual appreciation? How avoided? 



CHAPTER VII 
THE BIBLE AS SOUL-FOOD 

The Bible, someone has said, is " no end of a book " ; 
it touches the Hfe of every Christian worker or Christian 
man at a thousand points, rendering a thousand services, 
answering a thousand needs. Its variety is infinite, its 
richness inexhaustible. 

But its first chief, supreme mission is to furnish food 
for his soul. This ought to be his supreme aim and quest 
when he studies it. What it can do for his mind, his 
perception of finer beauties, and for his work as a handler 
of souls, and as a molder of lives, we shall have occasion 
to mention later. But more important than all these, 
because fundamental or final in all these, is what it does 
for his own inner life, the life which he lives in relation 
to his God, where are hid the inner fountains of his 
thoughts, his feelings, his actions. 

Naturally, because the Christian worker's soul is first 
of all " his own vineyard,'' entrusted to him by Almighty 
God to be brought to the highest perfection and made to 
yield the best and loftiest fruit for God. Of course no 
man must take as his supreme object in life the saving 
of his own soul. That is not " the chief end of man," 
even though he think of that salvation in the highest 
terms — terms not of escaping hell or gaining heaven, but 
of acquiring Christlikeness. Yet the saving of his own 
soul, in the sense of bringing his spiritual life to its high- 

51 



52 The Book of Books 

est vitality and best fruitage, is every man's prime duty. 
This is his " talent " (or two or five), for which he must 
answer to the Owner, his Master. But the real " chief 
end of man " is much more than best self-exploitation, 
best self -development ; it is to be the fullest, completest 
channel for the life of God to flow through, to the glory 
of God in the enrichment of other souls. And the best 
thing any man can do for another is to bring him into 
touch with spiritual riches, to minister to his spiritual 
growth, the advancement of his soul. What the world 
needs is not knowledge, but power. And the power it 
needs is heart-power, soul-power, the power that means 
purity, unselfishness, closeness to Christ, effectiveness to 
Christ. And we can give others only what we have our- 
selves. 

More Than Intellectual Food 

It IS impossible, it is true, to feed the soul without first 
feeding the mind. We are intelligent beings, and our con- 
scious relation to God, our consciousness of relation to 
God, our thoughtful entering into God's thoughts, feel--; 
ings, willings, represent our highest and deepest possibili-^ | 
ties; they are our religious life, our soul life. But it is 
only when thoughts, truths, facts, are transmuted into 
feelings, will, action, that they make for the growth of 
the real inner man. 

The Bible can be read and studied with the keenest 
intellectual curiosity and appetite, or with the insight and 
outlook of a skilled workman looking in it for the princi- 
ples, materials, and tools of his craft, and yet utterly fail 
of its real mission. One suspects that the reason why our 
work is no better than it so often is, is because it is read 



The Bible as Soul-Food 53 

principally in that way, at least primarily in that way ; the 
other aim being with us so secondary that we get to it but 
imperfectly and feebly, or never get to it at all. 

Yet, if we will have it so, how richly the word ministers 
to every need of the soul, furnishes every ingredient of 
the souFs spiritual composition! 

Here we may find, here we must find, if we really find 
at all, that which deepens, strengthens, enlarges that tap- 
root of the soul's life, faith. The Bible's '''exceeding 
great and precious promises," the marvelous dealings of 
a faithful Creator with his trusting and obedient children, 
the trumpet-call example of faith's heroes, not only in 
" Hebrews eleven," but all through the book, and es- 
pecially the words, works, example, of him who is at once 
the supreme File-leader of our faith, and its supreme Ob- 
ject, Jesus, ought to be so studied, so dwelt upon, so 
absorbed, that they become our soul's very warp and 
woof, its essential pattern. 

And the main trunk of the soul-life's tree, love, how 
that will grow as we come to the Bible in this expectant, 
eager, loving way, and absorb the marvelous proclama- 
tions, the wonderful manifestations of the eternal, infinite 
love of God our Father, under the light of that; see the 
potential, and in so many ways the real lovableness of 
men our brethren, and above all, devotionally behold 
again the beauty of Him who was rich, yet for our sakes 
became poor that we through his poverty might become 
rich. " Herein is love ; not that we loved God, but that 
he loved us, and gave his Son to be the propitiation for 
our sins." What heart can help catching fire, beholding 
him, the altogether lovely, the chiefest among ten thou- 
sand, and hearing and heeding his word : " A new com- 



54 The Book of Books 

mandment give I unto you, that ye love one another, 
even as I have loved you " ? 

That Fine Spiritual Judgment 

Here too we shall be finding soul's food as we gain 
more and more the discrimination, the fine spiritual judg- 
ment which can " distinguish things that differ " and 
" approve the things that are excellent." If a man too 
often " condemneth himself by that which he alloweth," he 
may also reveal his advancement in the spirit life by the 
increasing fineness with which he sees the essential quali- 
ties of things and turns with spiritual intensity and force 
to the better. In Isaiah's description of the " branch," 
the English text has it " He shall draw his breath in the 
fear of Jehovah." That sort of habit, of breathing in the 
sweet, keen air of God's word, will mean what wonder- 
ful oxygenation, what purging of impurity, what building 
up of the soul's tissue in sanity and strength! But the 
Margin gives the alternative reading, " His scent shall be 
keen in the fear of Jehovah ! " 

We wonder sometimes at the almost unerring moral and 
spiritual discrimination of some people not particularly 
learned in the wisdom of the schools or of the market- 
places ; they rarely mistake, rarely think astray, much less 
go astray. They have absorbed the ideals, the spirit, the 
atmosphere, the sense of values, of the word of God, like 
someone who all his life long has been used to the best 
literature or statues or paintings, and can no more be 
deceived as to essential artistic or literary quality than 
can the expert in currency, his senses trained by thirty 
years' experience, mistake a counterfeit for the genuine 
money* 



The Bible as Soul-Food 55 



Other Soul-food Functions 

Many other soul-food functions of the Bible will occur 
to us. The central one is that its promises, its histories, 
its statements of truth, especially its story of the Life of 
lives, are the channel through which the direct life of 
Jesus comes into the soul. The Bible is the most glorious 
medium on earth, but its one significance is that it is a 
medium, a channel, for Christ himself. " If any man 
love me, he will keep my word, and I will love him, and 
will manifest myself unto him." The longer one lives in 
the Christian life the more he watches men, especially 
himself, the more impatient he becomes of anything in 
religion that does not bring the direct contact of the soul 
with Jesus Christ, Christ's life into effective action in the 
man's inner living. " I am the Bread of Life." The 
Bible itself is of importance only when, like the Samari- 
tan woman, it bears witness to Jesus, and men, following 
its suggestions, can then say, " Now we believe not (only) 
because of thy word, but because we have seen and do 
know that this is the Christ, the Son of God." 

The Bible will be the soul's food when w^e come to it 
for such food — ^that our one purpose, our one desire; 
when we accept its promises, act on its precepts, obey 
its commands, behold its visions, receive into our lives 
the power of its Christ. And no more important sugges- 
tion could be made than that the one prime requisite is 
that we should come to it in dependence upon, in confi- 
dent expectation of, in utter obedience to, the Spirit 
who has inspired it, and whose gracious task and privi- 
lege it is to take of the things of Christ and show them 
to us. 



56 The Book of Books 

All of this is familiar in theory; if it become familiar 
in practice we shall have a new generation of Christian 
workers ; and in this tremendous new day we must have 
just that. 

Questions and Topics 

1. What is the Bible's first mission? 

2. Why? 

3. Why does it so often fail of its mission? 

4. How does Bible study nourish the " taproot of the 
soul"? 

5. How does the '' soul's main trunk '' grow? 

6. Why do some Christians have such keen spiritual 
perception ? 

7. What IS the Bible's one supreme service? 

8. How may this be obtained? 

9. How translate theory into practice? 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE BIBLE BACKBONE 

Some subjects need only to be stated; they are self- 
evidencing and self-expository. This is one of them. The 
Bible is the spinal column of all our Christian work, the 
backbone without which everything would be weak and 
disjointed, lacking coherency and strength; the spinal 
cord, without which there would be neither religious in- 
telligence, feeling, or power. Any part through which its 
branching nerves do not run is cold, paralyzed, lifeless; 
there is no part which does not imperatively need its sub- 
stance, its flavor^ its impulse, and its power. We are all 
agreed. 

Keep in Sight First Principle 

But nothing is easier than to get so deep into the 
woods that you " cannot see the forest for the trees/' and 
in a maze of beautiful plans and a multitude of interest- 
ing and helpful details lose sight of first principles. Noth- 
ing is more necessary than every now and then, with what 
strength we may, to reaffirm these first principles. The 
multiplication-table and the alphabet have this advantage 
over the Bible: one cannot do a single problem of any 
length or read a sentence without them ; but, alas, one can 
do an immense amount of church and Sunday school 
work with only the shadiest reference to the Bible, if not 
a complete ignoring of it ; using it as a convenient " point 

57 



58 The Book of Books 

of departure/' or a string around which to crystallize the 
rock-candy of our own or other people's thoughts. Of 
course the final result of such work will no more pass 
muster than would our arithmetic without the multiplica- 
tion-table, or our rhetoric without our alphabet, but in 
our delighted absorption we fail to see the elements which 
are lacking. The religious life of those we teach and 
train, however, will reveal them all too soon under the 
crack and strain of life's daily pressures and stresses. 

The Bible is absolutely fundamental. The Bible it was 
that made the worker himself a Christian, that made him 
a worker, that gave him the religious experience which 
lies back of his impulse to be a worker, that gave him the 
basis of great fundamental truths on which he must stand 
to work, and it now gives him the heart and life and sub- 
stance of all his teaching and work. 

He can get nowhere else these complete, full, definite, 
thrilling truths about God and his being and character, 
truths about man's state and need, truths about God's and 
man's way of salvation, truths about human duty and des- 
tiny, and about the possibilities and pathways of the Chris- 
tian life. And from nowhere else do these truths come 
out with such strength, such emphasis, such force, such 
authoritativeness. It is the one primary source of re- 
ligious knowledge. Whatever else our work contains is 
just so much clothing, apparatus, flavoring, dilution of 
this. 

Imagine a Sunday school teaching and working without 
this running all through it to stiffen, strengthen, vitalize, 
and spiritualize it ; without a clear reference to the Bible's 
authoritativeness, without a strong infusion, a dominating 
infusion, of the Bible's teaching, however thoughtful. 



The Bible Backbone 59 

imaginative, scientific, poetical, tactful, beautiful, it 
might be ! 

Some Lesson Dangers 

The Uniform Sunday School Lessons of the past had 
two great defects recognized by all. What they did give 
of the Bible was " bones " rather than '' backbone." They 
lacked the central coordinating vertebral column of a 
systematic view of Bible teaching ; and they secured refer- 
ence to a more or less voluminous '' literature " about the 
Bible rather than to the Bible itself. How eloquently and 
indignantly our reformers used to fulminate about *' Npth- 
ing but Leaves," and frantically beckon teacher and pupil 
" back to the Bible " ! 

Is there a possibility that Improved Uniform Lessons 
and Graded Lessons of all sorts have not completely done 
away with the danger ? May pupils' and teachers' minds 
still be filled with a choice supply of excerpts from the 
best modern authors about the Bible and Bible times, with 
pretty thoughts in prose and verse about the fatherhood 
of God, the beauties of nature, the glories of character, 
the principles of ethics, and a thousand and one things 
delightful as flavoring and trimming, but not the main 
substance of religious truth, the main road to God ? No 
system is immune from the danger. That the Sunday 
school worker should know fundamentally whom he is 
to teach, may be conceded, for the Bible itself is only an 
instrument; it is not an end in itself; the end is the glory 
of God in the making and molding of character into the 
image of Jesus Christ. But that he needs fully as much 
to know what he is to teach, and to teach with — ^the word 
of God — must be insisted on. 



60 The Book of Books 

As has before been said, there are all sorts of cooling 
drinks, of various flavors; but the one thing in any of 
them that really quenches thirst is the water it contains, 
for that alone suppHes the waste of tissue whose painful 
expression thirst is. There may be many shapes, colors, 
polishes to the handle of the glazier's tool, but the one 
thing that severs the ties between the molecules of glass is 
the diamond point. Many may be the sizes and shapes of 
the hydraulic miner's hose, but what dissolves the hill 
ahead of him and frees the imprisoned gold is the mighty 
force of the water that drives down from its reservoir in 
the hills. It is the amount of Bible that gets into contact 
with the life of the Sunday school, and throue-h that the 
amount of the life and power of Jesus Christ, that means 
our work's efficiency. Pedagogy, machinery, methods, 
are all of use for distribution and application; but the 
Bible is, under God, the power, the substance. 

Get the Thing Itself 

There is nothing superstitious or platitudinously pious 
about all this. The Bible has been God's chosen medium 
for bringing his truth and life into contact with men. He 
has used the choicest religious geniuses of the race in its 
production. He has packed it full of the deepest and 
most thrilling religious thought, expressed with a pith, a 
power, a pungency, a pregnancy, unsurpassed anywhere. 
He has blessed its use again and again and again in the 
great religious uplifts of the race, and in the upbuilding 
of individual souls. It comes to us with the momentum 
of the religious use and power of thirty centuries. Fairly 
presented to the mind and heart of young or old, it 
awakens responsive echoes in the profoundest depths of 



The Bible Backbone 61 

their beings. They who have used it most feel as Paul 
felt about the gospel : '' I am not ashamed of the " Bible, 
" for God has used it as power unto salvation " for 
every sort of people under every sort of circumstance. 
We are ready confidently to apply it to every soul we 
touch. 

We shall seek ourselves to become " mighty in the 
Scriptures '' ; we may, and we want to, know about many 
books ; but we must know this book, or our religious life 
and work is spineless. We must make our pupils, and 
those we eitectively touch, know this book, or their re- 
ligious life will be spineless too. Our enthusiasm for it 
shall kindle theirs. Our reverence for it shall inspire 
in them that unshod foot and bended head which are 
the indispensable conditions of receiving its deeper 
messages. Our constant, confident, obedient appeal 
to it shall make it for them, as for us, under the tui- 
tion of God's Spirit, the supreme authority in matters 
religious. It shall not be one of many instruments we use 
to accomplish God's purposes of grace ; it shall be the one 
of the many, around which all the others center, as it 
centers around Jesus Christ. Every detail of our work 
shall be jointed to it, framed upon it, informed by it; run 
through and through by the ramifications of its sensory- 
motor power, the spinal cord of the religious life, till its 
perception of God and its prescription of duty shall thrill 
to the nerve ends of all our work, that work, because of 
it, a strong, complete, substantial, vertebrate whole. 

Questions and Topics 

1. What is the Bible's place in Christian work? 

2. Give four reasons for this (in four sentences). 



62 The Book of Books 

3. What was a great fault of the Uniform Lessons, and 
a possible fault of the Graded ? 

4. Give three illustrations of the Bible's importance 
(three sentences). 

5. Give three reasons why it is so valuable (three sen- 
tences). 

6. What must be our aim and practice? ^| 

7. How can we secure for the Bible this proper place 
and relation ? 



CHAPTER IX 
BIBLE READING VERSUS BIBLE STUDY 

Bible reading is a delightful thing. To sit down to this 
overflowing treasure-house of spiritual information and 
suggestion, this opulent literary jewel-box, and let its 
riches run over your mind (to change the figure) as the 
gold-laden solutions run over the riffles in the separator, 
depositing as they will their wealth, to let its inspiring, 
stimulating, educating impressions play upon you — this, 
with a receptive and appreciative reader, is charming in 
the extreme. Picture the young Bossuet as he pores over 
Isaiah until his mind, by that master of imagination, is 
" subdued (ennobled, rather) to what it works in," 
thrilled, suffused, imbued, with those flowing figures, 
splendid imageries, exalted thoughts. The cultural value 
of appreciative and assimilating reading like that, just 
reading, is immeasurably great; nothing else can quite 
duplicate it. 

Devotional Bible Reading 

Bible reading is an essential thing, the devotional read- 
ing, when the man, as he ranges the sacred pages, is 
saying, '' Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth," when he 
questions each verse as to its message from God, each 
sentence to see what door into the eternal and spiritual 
it is opening. To live thus with Isaiah and John and 
Paul and Jesus, and God, in the Word, is not only de- 

63 



64 The Book of Books 

lightf ul ; there can be no spiritual health, strength, growth, 
without it. One thinks of Jenny Lind, sitting on the 
shore with an open Bible in her lap, and asked why she 
left the stage, replying, " It made me think less of this 
(looking out at the sea), and this (looking up at the sky), 
and this," looking down at the book. Nothing must rob 
us of the taste, the zest, the time, for that. 

Bible study is a very different thing; neither can take 
the other's place; but without the real, genuine Bible 
study, we shall miss the very best the Bible has to offer. 
Sometimes a prospective student, writing about his quali- 
fications, makes much of the fact that he has been very 
fond of Bible reading. If that means deepened apprecia- 
tion of the Word, heightened spiritual apprehension, 
greater intellectual and soul affinity for the things of the 
Spirit, good; but it may mean absolutely nothing, or 
worse than nothing for the real grapples with substance, 
the real grip on truth. 

Much Bible reading is like a great deal of other read- 
ing. Aimless, desultory, superficial ; it means " bleached 
brains," an enfeebled power of attention and thought; 
one is farther from the real substance of the Bible than 
he would be without it ; like the Pharisees with the king- 
dom, it enters not in itself, and the mind which would 
enter in, it hinders. It soon tires, skimming skim milk 
over and over; and the Bible becomes weary, stale, flat, 
and unprofitable. 

The " way of salvation " has been made so plain that 
wayfaring men, yea, fools, need not err therein, but the 
strong spiritual meat which means vigorous spiritual 
growth does not come so easy. The Bible's teachings, 
many of them, are so profound, so enwrapped with his- 



\Bible Reading versus Bible Study 65 

torical, local, rhetorical allusion, incident, they use such 
precision, often such subtlety, of expression, that they will 
not, cannot, yield their treasures to casual approach. 
And, when they have at the behest of care, thought, in- 
vestigation, yielded what they may, these yields can then 
be assimilated only by real and genuine study. 

What Bible Study Means 

Bible study means bending the mind, with all its 
powers, seriously, strenuously, persistently, upon the 
Bible. It means that every faculty is alert, employed. 
One may be half asleep and read ; he must be all awake, 
to study. 

It involves the careful questioning of every sentence, 
phrase, word, punctuation-mark, connection, tense, case, 
number, the very order of the words, the most " anxious " 
discrimination between words. It calls for reading, re- 
reading, re-re-reading, till the " tortured " passage almost 
cries out for relief. It demands that no sentence, phrase, 
word, shall be passed till it is understood, or till the mind 
is satisfied that it cannot be understood with the facilities 
at hand, and must be for the present held in suspense. 
This is always unsatisfactory, but the next best thing to 
knowing what a passage means is to know that you have 
tried your faithful best and cannot yet know what it 
means. Next best to writing " explored and mapped," is 
to write *' as yet unmappable." 

It means the tracing of a given word, statement, truth, 
through various verses, chapters, books, and marking the 
likenesses or diiferences or relations of the varying uses 
or phrases. 

There must be the careful appraisal of the different 

E 



66 The Book of Books 

mental habits, view-points, word-uses, styles of reasoning, 
as the stately argumentation of Hebrews, the " logic on 
fire " of Romans, the fugue-like circlings and prosaic at- 
mospheres of James, Proverbs' epigrammatic aphorisms, 
the lyric lilt and throbbing passion of Psalms, Isaiah's 
soaring wing, John's absolute blacks and whites without 
touch of gray between, Ezekiel's symbolic figures. 

Fully as much as anything else we need to get the 
" setting," the surrounding. To how many are the allu- 
sions and arguments and single words of Colossians, its 
" fulness," " angels," " principalities," " powers," " phi- 
losophy," "voluntary humility," utterly unmeaning? 
They have not discovered the particular situation and error 
Paul is combatting. Hebrews, almost the Bible's most 
wonderfully beautiful book, is hard, crabbed, repellant, 
to those who do not know Leviticus, and the priesthood 
and sacrificial system of the Old Testament. 

Construction is equally necessary, putting together the 
truths thus gained into as consistent a system as possible 
so that each supposed new principle discovered can be 
tested, rejected, because of its failure to correspond, or, 
accepted, built into the structure. 

Bible Alone Not Sufficient 

All this cannot be done with the Bible alone as our 
apparatus. We must have before us all we can get of 
the results of the best skill and knowledge of our fellow 
men. Not only a dictionary, but a Bible dictionary which 
gives the technical Bible meanings, must be at hand. We 
may be logical and spiritual geniuses, but if we do not 
know what the single words mean with which we deal, 
we fail to get what the Holy Spirit has wrapped up in the 



Bible Reading versus Bible Study 67 

Bible for us. If we confound " atonement " and " recon- 
ciliation " we are not likely to go straight, whatever our 
genius, for right definitions are the rightly shaped blocks 
without which no thought-structure can be shapely, cor- 
rect, or enduring. 

A good Bible dictionary, commentary, concordance, 
Bible "text-book," brief popular summary of Christian 
doctrine, and every Bible translation we can lay hands 
on, beginning always with the American revision and the 
" Baptist Bible," then Rotherham, Weymouth, Twentieth 
Century, Moffatt; these are essential. Too expensive? 
Sell your cloak and buy this sword. To try to get at the 
deeper, more accurate understanding of the Scriptures 
without these is to try to study astronomy without a tele- 
scope, or set up as an assayer without beakers and burn- 
ers, crucibles and scales. The array of tools in the hands 
of the average Christian, or even teacher, is pitiful in the 
extreme. No wonder the Bible, except a few snatches 
here and there, is a sealed book. 

Hard work? Surely! One will have to use his 
memory, his powers of judgment and discrimination, re- 
flection and comparison, his strongest mental muscles, 
most delicate mental balances. No ore gives up its gold 
gratuitously ; if the sands roll down golden from the hills, 
you must tramp far over the plain or climb high up the 
mountain to where they are. But the reward ! " Mighty 
in the Scriptures ! " Spiritual food, spiritual clothing, 
spiritual equipment, spiritual power, ability to bring to 
others out of your own treasury things new and old. 
" Gird up thy loins now like a man ! " 

We are not forgetting with all this that spiritual things 
are spiritually discerned, that beyond the touch and ut- 



68 The Book of Books 

most reach of grammar and dictionary and commentary 
and the best use of our human apparatus and minds is the 
illuminating touch of God's Spirit on the eyes of our 
spirits, the unction from the Holy One whereby we may 
know all things. Too often men have thought the deep 
things of the Spirit could be extracted from the Scrip- 
ture mines by man's mere mental powers and appliances. 
(Alas^* they had nothing to draw with, and the well was 
deep. ? 

But let no one think that that unction of the Holy One 
is at the service of the lazy, the indifferent, the wilfully 
ignorant, the man who will not employ the intensest 
stretch of his own powers, the utmost use of every facility 
at his command to discover the " mind of the Spirit." 
Strait is the gate and narrow is the way, the gate of con- 
centration, the way of struggle, whereby we gain the 
kingdom of real Bible mastery. " Agonize to enter in." 

Questions and Topics 

1. What are the three great values of Bible reading? 

2. What are its defects? 

3. What six things does Bible study involve? (These 
are mentioned in six paragraphs.) 

4. Name some needed other books. 

5. What is needed more than books, and how obtained? 

6. How can we stimulate and promote real Bible study ? 



CHAPTER X 
THE PART AND THE WHOLE 

As has been said many times, the Bible is a wonder- 
fully unique and unified whole, with many and marvel- 
ously varied parts ; varied in time, place, authorship, man- 
ner, outlook, view-point, purpose, and in the phase, facet, 
area, of the divine truth displayed. How different is 
Ephesians from Ecclesiastes, Galatians from James, First 
Corinthians Thirteen from the Song of Deborah ! 

Yet every one is a necessary, an integral, ray of revela- 
tion's glorious white light; each furnishes a part of the 
surface of truth's shining sphere, the whole message of 
the whole God to the whole man about his whole life. 

But too often, taking these parts one at a time, we get 
imperfect, incomplete, distorted views. A half-truth may 
not always be a whole lie ; but unless we can learn how to 
handle it, a partial truth is sure to be a partial lie. It is 
one of the tragedies that lie beneath the surface of church 
history that systems of theology and ecclesiastical organ- 
izations have been built upon wrong views of separated 
portions of Scripture. 

No man can express all of himself at once ; if we never 
see any other expression, or lose ourselves in that particu- 
lar phase, we are seeing only a caricature, one-sided; if 
we do not rightly remember and relate his successive 
phases, but partly recall their fact, we label him " incon- 
sistent," " give him up " in humorous or cynical despair : 
an enigma, a " riddle we cannot rede." 

69 



70 The Book of Books 

No Part Can Be Viewed Alone 

No more can the Bible exhibit all its facets at once, 
even if we could grasp them. Even inspired human 
speech has its expressional limitations, not only as to the 
different present angles of the truth, but still more as to 
its advancing stages. It is impossible to utter the first 
rudiments of mathematics and the last conclusions of 
quaternions in the same breath to the same people. It 
cannot be done. 

Consequently, there is always danger of our " camping 
down " in one particular spot, bathing ourselves in one 
particular light-ray, forming fractional (and refractional) 
conceptions, blinding ourselves to vast spaces beyond, and 
sentencing ourselves to the primary school of Christian 
revelation, when we should have passed long ago into the 
university. 

This is the prime cause of half the divisions, " isms," 
and " cranky " crazinesses which seem to overrun all 
Christendom some of the time, and some Christians all the 
time. For this error there is a remedy and safeguard of 
spirit — a teachable, patient temper of mind, seeking and 
appropriating the guidance of God's own Spirit. The 
remedy and safeguard in method is hinted in our title: 
Each part must be studied in the light of the whole. The 
whole is the ultimate reason of the part ; it is the final ex- 
planation of the part ; to get the meaning of the part, you 
must set it in the midst of the whole. This is not a vague 
and glittering generality, obviously true, but with no defi- 
nite handle to seize it by, and no cutting edges to work 
with ; it pursues four very clear and simple principles of 
application, which will go very far to give us a broad, 



The Part and the Whole 71 

balanced, sane, satisfactory grasp of the Bible and its 
truths. 

Two Things to Consider 

First: The earlier portions must be interpreted in the 
light of the later. The earlier represent partial or ele- 
mentary knowledge; knowledge often not yet definitely 
crystallized into shape. It is obviously unwise to stop 
with these, or to pare down the later teachings to the size 
of the earlier ones. Take immortality and the state of the 
dead. Nowhere is the Bible's progressiveness more ap- 
parent. Immortality is hoped in the Old Testament, 
hinted, assumed, promised, taught, but not till Christ 
brought life and immortality to light through the gospel 
did the radiant flood of truth appear. Yet there are peo- 
ple today who would interpret the clear and luminous 
New Testament ideas according to the twilight of Eccle- 
siastes and the despairing cry of poor Hezekiah when 
death's chill shadow set his soul shivering. 

Second, more specific and particular: The Old Testa- 
ment must be interpreted in the light of the New, not the 
New in the light of the Old. This is the dispensation of 
the Spirit. The Old Testament forms, ceremonies, whole 
system, were preparatory, prophetic, typical, foreshadow- 
ing. The substance has come; shadows are done away. 
The Old casts light on the New ; you know a tree better 
by knowing its roots and its soil ; but the New Testament 
is the crown and explanation of the Old, as Christ was 
crown and explanation of John the Baptist. Many people 
forget, or never learned, that ideas of church-membership, 
the ordinances, the relation of Church and State, must 
be interpreted according to New Testament freedom and 



72 The Book of Books 

spirituality, not Old Testament formalism and tutelage. 
Calvin, Luther, Rome, the New England Congregational 
leaders who persecuted our Baptist forefathers, were 
carrying, like Lazarus, the grave clothes of the Old Dis- 
pensation out of the tomb into the sunlight of the New, 
and tried to force everybody else into them too. And 
some of us feel, with all the abundant love we sincerely 
have for our " separated brethren," that in every point 
where they fail to grasp our principles, we can see the 
egg-shell of Judaism still clinging to their backs. They 
are living, in these things, in the Old Testament, not in 
the New. 

Some Other Considerations 

Third : Passages which strongly present one phase of a 
great question must be interpreted, or balanced, by those 
which present the other. All truth is antithetic. That is 
why there are parties. With men as they are, it seems 
almost indispensable that each side have its insistent ad- 
vocates, so that humanity as a whole may come to see 
both. Those who hope for one great church are — ^beg- 
ging their pardons — as wildly visionary as those who 
should insist on just one political party, or just one view 
of any scientific theory. The Bible — universal book — 
strongly presents different, antithetic, often seemingly 
contradictory aspects of the same great questions. To 
seize and exclusively advocate and live in one of these 
altogether is " heresy " indeed, the " choice '' of a part 
instead of the whole. Christian thought, like all other 
thought, is forever on a pendulum swing. The person- 
ality of Jesus Christ so impressed his followers that the 
church, in its overpowering sense of his deity, began to 



The^ Part and the Whole 73 

ignore or forget or explain away the Scriptures that paint 
for us his true humanity. Upon the Unitarians of the 
early nineteenth century, his humanity was so deeply 
borne in, that they, in turn, forgot, ignored, explained 
away the many passages that can be understood on no 
other supposition than that he is also very God of very 
God, God manifest in the flesh. The believer in God's 
majestic sovereignty, for another instance, sometimes 
contrives to forget the passages that teach free will, and 
vice versa. Truth does not lie half-way between ; it em- 
braces both; not compromise, but comprehension, is the 
formula. " But they cannot both be held at once ? " 
Build each on its own basis of Scripture and reason, and 
hold it anyhow ! 

Fourth : Passages which stand out or jut up as difficult 
to understand or adjust must be interpreted by the general 
trend of the whole. The Bible is self -consistent; its tides 
flow one way. Any passage which seems to contradict 
the general trend cannot mean what it seems to mean. 
If it still refuses to be interpreted, gently lay it aside for 
further light; keep in the main stream. Whatever in 
local conditions or in the apostle's mind evoked that emi- 
nently wise advice to the Christian women of Corinth, 
it cannot, for universal application, mean anything that 
would dam the wide river of Christian liberty and 
equality : *' neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, bond 
nor free ! " That is the New Testament ! Sporadic pas- 
sages have been held to teach that spiritual grace is tied 
to some outward act, like regeneration to baptism or 
spiritual blessing to material elements in the Supper. It 
simply cannot be; the God who began our salvation in 
the Spirit will not perfect it in the flesh. 



74 The Book of Books 

Shall we further say: Any teaching based on one pas- 
sage alone must be suspected, or suspended f Perhaps not 
quite so baldly. If not manifestly inconsistent, if it can 
easily be seen how it may be consistent, if it is a minor, 
not a foundation, doctrine, one need not press the point. 
And yet any really important doctrine is so logically in- 
woven with others that there cannot fail to be many cor- 
roboratory passages. We can safely follow far, only the 
main line. 

This lays out a pretty exacting program of thought, 
study, balancing. Any well-ordered life is just that. 
Physically, one cannot walk, or stand, or sit, without 
balancing. Stop balancing, and you are prostrate. 

But in that growing steadiness of foot in Bible ways, 
that sane, solid, comprehensive Bible you are getting, 
what reward! Problems remain, passages not under- 
stood, or not related. He who does not find a good many 
does not know his Bible very well yet. You cannot 
exhaust the mysteries of God himself through eternity. 
Is it strange you cannot compass his book in a lifetime? 
But bringing every part to the whole, you will see the 
light spread farther and wider, and pierce deeper, every 
year. 

Questions and Topics 

1. Why is the Bible at once so unified and so varied? 

2. What is our frequent danger, and its result? 

3. What is the primary principle of Bible study? 

4. State four great principles of application. 

5. What may the fifth be? 

6. What is the reward of this difficult work? 



CHAPTER XI 
BIBLE TRANSLATIONS 

Too many practically ignore the fact that our English 
Bible is only a translation. We are so used to it, so 
reverence it, have so drunk it in, so felt its divine power, 
that we are almost like the Brazilian convert who felt 
that the Bible was written in Portuguese, or the Ameri- 
can who did not want any new-fangled Hebrew or Greek, 
but the good old Anglo-Saxon the apostle Paul used. 
But the best of our English Bibles is only a translation, 
subject to the limitations and possessing many of the im- 
perfections, inseparable from the very fact and process 
of translation. 

Three Difficulties in Translation 

What the average reader who has not stopped to think 
about it has not seen, is that translation is a most diffi- 
cult task. The translator has to do at least three very 
hard and delicate things. He has to master the gram- 
matical forms and combinations and dictionary meanings 
of the language he is liranslating from. Then he has to 
use the knowledge thus gained, in trying to find out, as 
nearly as he can, just what the original writer meant; 
and that depends on more than mere grammar-forms and 
dictionary-meanings ; it depends upon the thought-forms, 
the habitual content and ways of thinking, of the writer's 
race, people, section, class, and of the individual writer 

75 



76 The Book of Books 

himself, who is different from every other. Then he has 
to bring that final meaning, which he hopes he has dis- 
covered, and put it into the grammar-forms, dictionary- 
meanings, and thought-forms, of his own language, not 
of his own language and race in general, but of the time 
for which he is making this particular translation; for 
these forms are continually shifting. The difficulty is 
much increased by another condition, inherent in all lan- 
guage, our own or others', namely, that no word is ever 
the exact expression of an idea ; it is really just the sym- 
bol of the idea ; the idea much larger than the word. You 
can be certain of two things : that you will not get your 
whole idea to come over with your word when you trans- 
late ; and you did not even get in the first place the whole 
idea your word was meant to convey. Something always 
fails to come through. Of what comes through someone 
always fails to get the whole. Hence the Italian proverb : 
'' Traduttori semper traditori/' " Translators always 
traitors." 

Of course, God's truth in his inspired word is so won- 
derful and has such vital power, that through a transla- 
tion, imperfect as it is, the main outlines of truth can 
usually come, " able to make wise unto salvation." Yet 
by some translations many have been led sadly astray ; in 
some passages the error has been mountainous, the evils 
numberless. But even without fatal or serious error, a 
faulty translation fails to render as well as might be 
rendered, the sweetness, flavor, exact meaning, size, finer 
beauties, of our book ; we are seeing God's word through 
a glass darkly. 

No Bible translation can be " final " ; probably none 
again '* final," like the King James, for two centuries. 



Bible Translations 77 

Because two things are constantly changing. Our knowl- 
edge of the actual wording of the book itself in the 
original, and of the original language, advances. The 
1881 revisers had incomparably better Greek texts than 
the King James revisers had. Their knowledge of Greek 
and Hebrew was almost as much superior; the whole 
science of comparative philology, of Assyriology, or 
Egyptology, had arisen since 1611. We may not see as 
great comparative advance in our day ; but who dare say 
we shall not? And the English language changes. 
Grammar had somewhat altered. The meaning and use 
of words had, very much more ; so that a word like " let '' 
had come to mean precisely opposite in 1881 to its mean- 
ing in 1611. That change will inevitably continue. We 
shall aways be choosing Bible translations. 

First Essential in Translation 

The first thing we want in a Bible translation is accu- 
racy. It must render the best possible Greek or Hebrew 
" text '' with the utmost possible fidelity to the thought of 
the original wTiter, in the English of today in the exactest 
and clearest language possible. After accuracy, we would 
like beauty, stateliness, force, literary excellence, modern- 
ness, " reality/' vividness ; but accuracy first ; this is the 
word of God ; we want it as nearly as possible exactly as 
it was given to men. 

We need more than one translation. A translation is 
like a photograph of a statue, made for a " stereoscope " ; 
it gives a view of the original author's thought from a 
certain standpoint, that of the translator or translators. 
But that truth is round; and there are many view-points. 
Each other translation, well, fairly, honestly done, sheds 



78 The Book of Books 

new light on the Word, gives a rounder, fuller, more solid 
view. One who kno\ys several languages has greater 
advantage here over the merely English reader. His 
French Bible, or German, or Swedish, or Latin, gives 
him another angle than his own, and supplies him with a 
richer Bible. The wise English student crowds his Bible 
shelf with EngHsh translations he knows, of his own 
acquaintance or from reliable recommendation, to be 
good. 

The best Bible translation, other things equal, is the 
one which is the product of the scholarship of many minds 
working at the same passage. A translation of a single 
book, or of the whole Bible, by one man is apt to be 
bolder, fresher, more original, more " consistent " ; but it 
is not so reliable. It represents the range of his scholar- 
ship only, the poise of his judgment only, the selective 
power of his mind only, the peculiar angle and coloring 
of his mentality, and the bias of his style of thought, 
opinion, theory, and prevailing " theology " ; also the 
idiosyncrasy of his particular literary style. In its en- 
deavor to be up-to-date, original, decisive, it is likely to 
fall into two errors; it becomes a paraphrase or a com- 
mentary, not a translation; it does not, like a faithful 
servitor, a scrupulous spokesman, simply deliver its mes- 
sage as nearly as may be in the words in which it was 
given, but inserts its own interpretation into the transla- 
tion. And, second, consciously or unconsciously, in the 
effort after novelty, and the endeavor to justify its own 
existence, it becomes so very *' modern '' and individual 
as often to be flippant, undignified, and picturesque at the 
expense of accuracy and reverence. The translation 
which is the work of many minds is more timid, less 



Bible Translations 79 

colorful, leaves more interpretations doubtful; but it is 
saner, safer, probably vastly nearer the truth. In those 
very places where it seems unsatisfactory because it leaves 
ambiguous what you would like to see boldly decided, as 
they so often are by the independent translator, it is 
much truer to the actuality, for the very fact that the 
battles fought over the passage by the cooperating trans- 
lators resulted in a '' draw," shows that the Holy Spirit 
left it that way, so far, at least. The independent trans- 
lation is good for suggestiveness, for frequent strikingly 
beautiful ideas that throw many doors of thought wide 
open. But the composite is the surer, more reverent 
guide, leading you with humbler spirit into more certain 
places. 

American Standard Revision 

For accuracy, for poise, balance, saneness, reverence, 
the English reader of today can find nothing better than 
the American Standard Revision. In some places where 
they diflfer it is inferior to the King James in stately 
sonorousness and literary beauty, because the English 
language reached its highwater mark in these qualities 
when the King James revision was made ; and has ebbed 
since then; but also, usually, where they diflf.er there is 
simply no comparison in accuracy, fidelity to the best 
Greek or Hebrew text, and adequate rendering into 
English sufficiently modern to be correctly understood. 

Next to the American Standard is to be placed the 
" Improved Version,'' the so-called " Baptist Bible," 
which, if it were not so called, and so did not have the 
handicap of the single denominational backing, would 
" run the Standard hard " in some places ; the New Tes- 



80 The Book of Books 

tament, especially, is not only in no way inferior, but 
often bolder, truer, more independent, more faithful. In 
the Old Testament, while unsurpassed in scholarship, it 
shares some faults of the independent translation, here 
and there reflecting a little too narrowly the scholarship, 
atmosphere, and '' reaction " of one man; '' a lion," to be 
sure, but " only one." 

The King James for associations, for literary beauty, 
for culture in English style; but no one should feel in 
any given passage that he is really walking as absolutely 
as may be in the footprints of the thinking of God in his 
Word, till he has compared the King James with the 
Revision there. 

A splendid commentary, full of sidelights and sugges- 
tions, is Rotherham's Emphasized Translation, now 
covering the whole Bible. But one must remember that 
" emphasis is exposition " ; and by his emphasis, perhaps 
unconsciously, he invites you to follow in his steps and 
accept his interpretations, instead of hearing and inter- 
preting for yourself. 

Exhibiting more of the fine results of good modern 
scholarship is Weymouth's " New Testament in Modern 
Speech," full of suggestiveness, careful, yet revealing 
more of his own individuality, perhaps, than is always 
helpful. Full of vivid light is " The Twentieth Century 
New Testament," but too often a paraphrase and com- 
mentary, rather than a translation ; not to be followed too 
trustingly by one who cannot test it by his own study of 
the Greek ; and so " modern in speech " that one reading 
it aloud finds himself getting into a light, *' heady," flip- 
pant tone. 

Of Mofifat's even more brilliant translation, the same 



Bible Translations 81 

may be said. Awakening, thought-provoking, bold, full 
of pregnant phrases, it will often lead one off into the 
translator's ideas rather than Paul's or John's; and it 
gives you a lively Scotch-English rendering of a very 
powerful collection of Christian writings of the first cen- 
tury (mostly) rather than the stately, majestic, sacred 
Word of God. 

Have them all. Read them all. Study them all. Let 
their light play here and there on your " Bible-studious " 
path. But follow the American Standard Revision. 

Questions and Topics 

1. Why is translation difficult? (Three sentences.) 

2. What harm does faulty translation do ? 

3. Why can no translation be final ? 

4. What is the first requisite in a translation? 

5. Why we need more than one. 

6. Some reasons why a ''composite" translation is 
best. 

7. The points of superiority of the American Standard. 

8. Name some other good translations. 

9. Which shall we follow f 

10. Which shall we use in public ? 



CHAPTER XII 
WHY THE BIBLE IS HARD 

The Bible is not hard everywhere, to anybody. Few 
people with " normal " religious instincts, though uncon- 
verted, will fail to see and enjoy the beauty of the 
Twenty-third Psalm or First Corinthians 13. It abounds 
in such springing fountains of pure delight; intellectual, 
emotional, spiritual. There are many people to whom 
very little of it is " hard." Some is yet uncomprehended, 
fully; some will continue to demand the best exercise 
of their mental muscles ; there are depths into which only 
much study, thought, experience, the Spirit's illumination, 
will lead them ; but it is not " hard " ; only profound, and 
weighty, and challenging. 

But to many it is hard : mysterious, crabbed, baffling ; 
bristling with questions unsolved, allusions unknown, vast 
areas of dry details ; here and there a sparkling spring or 
glinting diamond, but few and far between ; the tired and 
disappointed explorer soon gives up the quest. 

The reasons have many times been suggested in these 
chapters, under various topics; but it may not be amiss 
to add, restate, and classify. 

Three Chief Reasons 

They are found partly in the Bible itself, partly in our- 
selves, partly in our methods. 

The subjects with which the book deals are the most 

82 



Why the Bible Is Hard 83 

profound and difficult the human mind can grapple. 
Nothing can make them easy. " Teach me the whole 
law while I stand on one foot." The rabbi made a brave 
attempt, and said a fine thing; but he did not succeed, 
or half succeed; he couldn't. Sir William Ramsay says 
that Revelation " is not a book which he that runs may 
read." Nobody will understand a real text-book in 
geometry, chemistry, metaphysics, without great drops of 
intellectual sweat. Why expect to grasp or penetrate the 
deep relations between God, man, the universe, while ly- 
ing in a mental hammock ? 

It often approaches these great subjects from a mental 
view -point foreign to our own; emanating from, ad- 
dressed to, a distant age, different geographical sur- 
rounding, social surrounding, habit of mind, mental out- 
look. Wonderful how " universal " it is, how little, even 
superficially, of the merely local, national. But there is 
some, and that some is enough to puzzle, baffle, repel, the 
mind that has never learned to " jump out of its own 
skin," and " think black," or " think Jew," or think " first- 
century Christian," in addition to " twentieth-century 
American." If it requires mental gymnastics to under- 
stand a German or a Frenchman, or even a Southerner or 
Northerner, do we expect to lie flat on our backs and 
think ourselves everywhere into God's marvelous Oriental 
book? 

It employs such a variety of literary forms, each to 
be interpreted in its own way. Not always is it easy to 
remember that in a given passage we are dealing with 
sententious Hebrew epigram, not the definitions and pre- 
scriptions of a law-book; that this other is a lively dia- 
logue between different personages, not the steady utter- 



84 The Book of Books 

ance of some single voice; and this, again, is glowing 
Oriental imagery: the wheels of thought have left the 
earth of prosaic statement, mounting on the wings of 
godlike imagination, not a calm prose pronouncement of 
bare unkindled fact. No wonder, puzzled, baffled, mysti- 
fied, like the dove of the deluge, you find no place for the 
sole of your foot. 

Things Remote from Us 

Good long stretches deal with periods and details now 
uninteresting, because foreign, past, unknown, with no 
clear bearing on our own life. They had their part in 
the progressive life of God's people and his book. There 
is fascinating interest in them now, if one has time and 
equipment. It was my lot, not long ago, to prepare an 
article for a biblical encyclopedia on Hebrew genealogy. 
The study was as interesting as any novel, bristling with 
pregnant suggestions, fascinating vistas, quaint " finds." 
But the casual glance sees only a barren stretch of un- 
couth names and unmeaning detail. 

The Bible is crowded with things that cannot be dis- 
cerned at all, unless revealed in some way or other by the 
Spirit of God. The words are there, but the thoughts 
evade all but the illumined eye. Some are teachings in- 
herently repugnant to the " natural man," " foolishness 
unto him." " Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is 
the kingdom of God." " Blessed are the meek, for they 
shall inherit the earth." No *' psychical man " believes, or 
perceives, those things. They flatly oppose all his think- 
ing, all the principles on which his life is organized. He 
will have to be " born again," de-aligned, and re-aligned, 
and made over, before he will see them. Others can be 



Why the Bible Is Hard 85 

understood only after one has walked with Jesus and the 
Spirit through certain experiences. " Blessed are they 
that mourn, for they shall be comforted." Only the 
Christian from whose mist of godly tears the Sun of 
righteousness has brought out the rainbow of hope, and 
more, can receive that. Other truths deal with the deep- 
est relations of the human spirit and the divine, being the 
" things in the heavens," the furniture, fittings, fillings, 
of the throne-room of God, never to be seen till the Holy 
Spirit illumines them and the soul. Macaulay's Otaheitan 
looked a second at the cathedral's majestic front, then 
ran into a toyshop to play with beads. (^" Hard " is the 
Bible, when the eye strains and strains toward the 
heavenly altitudes and majesties, and sees nothing, be- 
cause it has nothing with which to see.} 

Mental and Religious Inertia 

Our minds too lack the energy, and our wills the pur- 
pose, to scale the heights and break through the barriers. 
We expect predigested food, milk for babes; and the 
Word's deeper things are solid food for strong men who 
by use have their spiritual senses exercised. 

Our habitual subjects of thought are not in line with 
the Bible subjects. It is hard, at times impossible, to 
switch into effective operation on the Scripture. Some 
versatile minds at an instant's signal can turn all their 
full force from the civilization of the Central American 
Mayas or the problems of pork production to Einstein's 
theory of relativity as affecting the undulatory theory of 
light and the metaphysical reality of time and space. 
Most of us move on in straight lines along our principal 
momentum, and how shall he who for fifteen and three- 



86 The Book of Books 

quarter hours has been thinking of the world, the flesh, 
if not the devil, be prepared to switch for the other quar- 
ter into the channel of the things of the Spirit ? 

Too often our spiritual interest, zeal, appetite, are in- 
sufficient, not only to get us at the hard work required, 
but also to furnish the spiritual masticating action, and 
digestive juices, that '* reading with the tongue," which 
makes the Bible's hardest places finally easy. The flinti- 
est wheat yields its substance to vigorous teeth, sturdy 
saliva, and potent gastric- juice. But real food is dry to 
the tongue which brings no moisture of its own. True 
in various degrees of the Christian, how triply true of the 
unconverted souls ! One wonders that any such was ever 
found with the open Bible before him. 

Our low stage of spiritual advancement, our narrow 
spiritual experience, the small degree to which we are 
letting the Spirit illumine us, wall away the Bible treas- 
ures. When all these conditions are favorable, their long 
ray cuts the darkness of the passage into the Bible mine, 
brings us into the inner chambers, lights up the walls 
with gleaming glories almost dazzling. Without them, 
how dark! 

Methods are at fault. We approach the Bible too in- 
frequently. The incalculable advantage of momentum, 
cumulation, " making the iron hot by striking," we for- 
feit. We need them all. 

We approach it too lightly, taking too little time for 
the right mind-impact, for getting large enough sec- 
tions, for mature thought, for incubation. One might 
learn Esperanto by fifteen-minute daily stretches, but 
you cannot learn the language of Canaan or map out 
Zion's walls so. 



Why the Bible Is Hard 87 

We approach it too languidly ; formally, or in the tired 
fifteen minutes just before we sleep, or the hasty fresher 
fifteen in the morning. Seldom the fresh, vigorous, tense, 
nervous, vital grapple. 

We approach it unintelligently. We could use the 
Standard Revision, which allows us to follow unhindered 
the mind of the Spirit, but we take the King James, which 
chops it up unnaturally, misleading, interrupting. We 
fail to follow the law of '' known to unknown," " easy to 
hard," and attack the difficult first, or take it " hit-or- 
miss." We treat alike precept, law, poetry, prophecy, 
history, making the Bible mean a thousand things it does 
not, and missing a thousand things it does. We fail to 
use the abundant literature of comment and explanation 
which light up its obscure allusions. We would not 
expect to get at Virgil or Browning without that. 

Greatest defect of all, we approach it too often, prayer- 
lessly. Prayerlessly means without expectation, without 
preparation, without illumination, without appropriation, 
without assimilation. If the undevout astronomer is 
mad, who is imbecile, deaf, blind, senseless, like " my 
servant " who approaches his Bible without prayer ? 

Questions and Topics 

1. /^ the Bible "hard"? 

2. Name four reasons in the Bible itself (five sen- 
tences). 

3. Name five reasons in ourselves (five sentences). 

4. Name five reasons in our methods (five sentences). 

5. What things, human and divine, will make it 
easy r 



CHAPTER XIII 
SATURATED SOLUTIONS 

When any substance, solid, liquid, or gaseous, takes up 
into itself all it possibly can of a certain other substance 
around it or in it, we say that it is *' saturated." The 
water will hold no more salt or sugar, the air will held no 
more moisture. Then, at a touch, the saturated fabric 
drops water, the overladen air deposits dew, forms cloud, 
or sends down rain, the crystal-saturated liquid exudes 
crystal, drops crystal, covers with crystal whatever it 
touches, and if the process is long enough and intimate 
enough converts it into crystal. If evaporation reduces 
the proportion of water so that it cannot carry so much 
of the other substance, the surplus is deposited, " precipi- 
tated " ; and if you put a stick, string, any solid, into the 
liquid it will begin at once to lay down the excess chemi- 
cal upon that surface. In this way is made the familiar 
" rock candy " of our childhood. A saturated solution of 
sugar crystallizes around the string. Innumerable natu- 
ral crystals of every sort came into existence thus, by 
evaporation, cooling, or some other shock. The wonder- 
ful stalagmites and stalactites of our limestone caves thus 
originated, and deposits not so beautiful. 

Soul Saturation Incomplete 

No one can be literally " saturated " with the Bible. 
Our natures will always have deeper and finer fibers 
88 



Saturated Solutions 89 

which its blessed truths and influences will be progres- 
sively reaching; always more of it to take in, and more 
of us to take it in. No one can rightfully sing: " Bread 
of heaven ! Feed me till I want no more ! " We will want 
more, and get more, all the time. 

But it certainly is possible to be so full of Scripture 
facts, truths, words, spirit, that our lives present all the 
phenomena of saturation. We can readily think of many 
such minds, in and out of the Bible. How full Matthew 
is of Old Testament prophecies about Christ ! Every sa- 
lient incident or fact of Christ's life precipitates a Scrip- 
ture reference : " That it might be fulfilled." Paul was 
like that with the Old Testament too ; and John's Apoca- 
lypse, with few formal Scripture quotations, fairly drips 
Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Joel, Zechariah, and the rest. No 
mind was ever more original and self-initiating than our 
Lord's; but see how touch or event or friend or enemy 
precipitates the Bible allusions, from start to finish, from 
the temptation's " It is written " to the anguished cry 
upon the cross : " My God, my God, why hast thou for- 
saken me?" "Modern instances" are the Puritan 
writers and preachers, poets like Milton, Shakespeare, 
Longfellow, Whittier, Browning. What Bible-saturated 
men were Spurgeon and Moody and A. J. Gordon — ^to 
name no others ! 

A Bible-saturated mind precipitates Scripture at a 
touch. And who can overestimate the value of that ? We 
need the Bible truths, words, principles, at our tongues' 
ends, at our hearts' depths. We need them for warning, 
as one needs a monitory beacon on some to us uncharted, 
dangerous coast; we need them for direction, as one 
needs a road map in new country where he can so easily 



90 The Book of Books 

go astray ; we need them for defense, like Christ's " it is 
written '' thrust between him and Satan's allurements ; we 
need them for offense, as when, pleading with some soul 
for his salvation, we must have a sharp-tipped, feathered 
arrow from God's word to pierce to his heart; we need 
them about our work, for soothing, for instruction, for 
spiritual construction. Who has not wondered at the old 
Christian worker or minister who always had an appro- 
priate Scripture text or passage for every occasion, every 
need ? It seemed to us like genius sometimes, and some- 
times like inspiration. It may have been the latter, some- 
what ; but it was so because it was first saturation : " He 
shall bring to your remembrance all I said unto you/' en- 
tangled in the meshes of your mind. 

Precipitating Scripture at a Touch 

A Bible-saturated mind, in thus precipitating Scripture 
at a touch, surrounds with Scripture brightness, beauty, 
jeweled value, holy sacredness, things that would other- 
wise be trivial, passing, fleeting. Whittier's miracle of 
the winter storm which turns every common weed into a 
filagree of silver is repeated a thousand times in such a 
mind. The Chinese thrust a little idol-shaped bit of metal 
inside the oyster's shell, and the moUusk's life-forces, 
roused by the irritation, begin to cover the intruder with 
a layer of pearl. In Spurgeon's " Dropping Well of 
Knaresborough," sticks and twigs become rods and 
fronds of Jasper. Alas, that there are minds so other- 
than-Bible-saturated that good things, great things, true 
things, at once are crusted with gall, venom, verdigris, or 
pinchbeck ! But if a man's appreciation of familiar Bible 
beauties has been delicate and keen and joyous, how his 



Saturated Solutions 91 

heart secretes Bible gold, silver, diamond, around the 
details of his daily life and thought. 

It does more. It not simply covers with Scripture 
beauty and value all it touches ; it also begins to organize, 
according to Scripture principles and shapes, all the things 
that come to it. Plato felt that the only reality about any 
object was the idea in it, as the sculptor's idea is the only 
real significance and value, even the cause, of the statue. 
Aristotle gave depth and force to Plato's notion by calling 
the " idea " the " form," that inner law and force whereby, 
for example, oaklif e shapes itself always as oaklife, never 
as beach or apple, and the quartz of crystal always ar- 
ranges its particles in its own appropriate shape, never in 
the shape of garnet or of diamond. When a man's mind 
has absorbed the Bible into its inmost substance, the Bible 
begins to work a new alignment in his soul, a new law of 
crystallization for his thoughts ; he has seized the master 
clew; things begin to shape themselves, consciously and 
unconsciously, " according to the pattern on the mount." 
Every really consistent mind. Christian or not, has some 
such central line or lines of crystallization; that is what 
makes one man a scientist, another a poet ; one man a 
profiteer, another a philanthropist ; one an idealist, another 
a materialist. But the Spirit of God, using the words of 
the Bible, begins to make a new crystallization for the 
soul : " Old things are passing away, all things are becom- 
ing new." 

You can see this new creation begun and going on. You 
can see the Bible ideas and ideals taking the place of the 
others, driving them out if they will not be transformed, 
transforming them if they can be, until by and by not only 
the arrangement, the alignment, but the very substance 



92 The Book of Books 

has been transmuted. Some saturation is mechanical, as 
when water takes up salt. Some is chemical, where the 
substance taken up unites in closest union with the other 
and transforms it into something fuller, richer than be- 
fore. " This is that." As Ariel sings in Shakespeare's 
" Tempest '' : 

Full fathom five thy father lies ; 

Of his bones are coral made; 
Those are pearls which were his eyes; 

Nothing of him that doth fade 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange. 

You will see such a change taking place, at any rate 
see that the influence has been exercised, even in the 
habitual modes of expression, the literary style, of such 
Bible-saturated writers or speakers. Whence did the 
uncouth woodsman of Illinois or the untaught graduate 
of the gipsy van gain that limpid clearness, that haunting 
charm, that stately simplicity, but as the Bible entered 
mind and heart? Keep up the process long enough, inti- 
mately enough, and the change will extend to being's in- 
nermost springs. The semiprecious stones which once 
were wood were made that way. They took up into their 
fibers all they could of the crystalline solution that sur- 
rounded them. Then as each particle of wood decayed, a 
particle of crystal took its place, until at last, instead of 
ugly, rotting vegetable, you had a gleaming, imperishable 
gem. " Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, 
whatsoever things are lovely, think on these things.'' 
" We all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the 
glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image 
from glory to glory." 



Saturated Solutions 93 

The process of such saturation is more than mere care- 
less, superficial reading, more than the absorption of 
habit, more than mere retentive memory, however active, 
more than the assimilating and organizing power of the 
mind itself, more than even deep reflection and commu- 
nion; it is the applying and "fixing" and transforming 
power of the Spirit of God. And every one of these is 
at our command. 

Who of us is a candidate for the saturated mind? 

Questions and Topics 

1. When is a solution " saturated "? 

2. Name some '' Bible-saturated minds " in and out of 
the Bible. 

3. Name some values of such a mind in our Christian 
life and work. 

4. What does it do for life's fleeting, trivial things ? 

5. What does it do with the facts and thoughts that 
come to us ? 

6. What change does it work even with words and 
expression ? 

7. What are the elements in this saturation ? 



CHAPTER XIV 
YOUR OWN BIBLE 

That means, of course, your own copy, marked and 
remarked at the favorite passages, thumbed and re- 
thumbed, till, in spite of your utmost neatness, the path 
of your searching mind and fingers can be traced in deep- 
ening tints and fraying edges from cover to cover. This 
Bible is home to you. You can find your way in it almost 
in the dark ; you know where its refreshing shades, gush- 
ing fountains, and rich caches are. All through it are 
pages and passages redolent of opulent associations. 
Here God gave you peace and comfort, " clear shining 
after rain." There some great searching, illuminating 
truth of God burst on your startled soul. You never 
pass a certain page without that other great promise of 
spiritual power standing out as you remember it to have 
stood out at that testing season of your life. How often 
God has blessed your soul, and other souls, as you have 
used this passage to lead another life into the posses- 
sion and acknowledgment of Christ ! That is your Bible, 
through and through. You would not change it for any 
other ; you hang on to it till the last possible moment ; you 
have it rebound, and rebound again. Nothing can take 
its place ; it is more than yours ; it is almost you. " Give 
me that ! " 

You have bought this Bible with interest and attention 
and reading and prayer and appropriation. 
94 



Your Own Bible 95 



What This Involves 

But " Your Own Bible " means much more than this. 
After all, this well-worn copy, sacred and dear, is only 
the body ; " Your Own Bible '' is the soul that dwells 
within; not the paper and ink and binding, but God's 
authentic message which has come to you. It is your 
own because it represents your own study, your own 
thought, your own conclusions. Your mind delved into 
these passages ; your reason wrestled with these problems 
of interpretation and relation ; you yourself, for yourself, 
and by yourself, worked out these results ; you made these 
spiritual discoveries in God's word; and you have tried, 
tested, proved, in your own heart and life-experience these 
glorious truths and promises. 

When the book was first put into your hands, it was 
" Father's Bible," or " Mother's Bible," or the Bible of 
the venerable past ; it is all these still, triply so now ; but 
it is yours, worn by your effort, woven into the fibers of 
your soul. Now you believe it, not because someone told 
you, but because you have met it personally, heard it 
personally, and do know that it is the living word of the 
living God. 

Such a Bible cannot be readily taken away from you ; 
it is not a tradition, but a possession; not a communica- 
tion, but an experience. " After the bread is baked, try 
to pull the yeast out of it ; as easily can you pull the Juda- 
ism out of a Jew," someone said. As easily can anyone 
pull that Bible out of you. Such a Bible can be wielded 
in God's work with certainty, precision, and power. You 
know its value, its weight, its " feel," the meaning of 
every part. You have " the hang " of it. Your hands 



96 The Book of Books 

have gripped its handle so long in so many a hard-fought 
field, that it will not slip or slide, and you will not fumble 
with it. It is not Saul's armor thrust into your hands just 
before the battle ; it is your own pouch of stones from the 
brook, your own sling. 

There is nothing immodest or arrogant about your de- 
termining to have your own Bible. You are fully aware 
that on many points in it you need help. You must get 
help on points of ancient customs, geography, grammar, 
the meanings of words. The Holy Spirit promises no 
magic power of discovering such things " out of your 
own inner consciousness." Grammar, lexicon, history, 
commentary, are necessary in getting the rich ore of 
truth out of the Bible mine. You will be very modest 
about contravening, or declaring independence of, the ripe 
results of the scholarship and experience of the good and 
great and learned of the past and present. " Cocksure- 
ness " is no aid to real Bible possession. And yet at the 
last every interpretation, every suggestion, every teaching, 
must pass before the court of final resort, your own 
spirit-guided mind and heart. If they cannot commend 
themselves to that, you may be compelled to suspend 
judgment, leave them for a while uncertain, " pending," 
but you must not accept them ; they are " second-hand," 
unassimilated, unassimilable. 

Limitations of Human Guidance 

You are not going to put yourself into any human 
master's hand to be absolutely guided by him, to follow 
docilely at his will. It was one who had not yet got hold 
of the clue, whose mind had not yet been illumined to see, 
who said, when asked " Understandest thou what thou 



Your Own Bible 97 



readest?" "How can I, except one guide me?" You 
are glad to ask advice. You will ask much. You will 
read, learn, mark, and inwardly digest — then make up 
your own mind. God has given you your mind to be 
used in this way. 

There will be, among your Bible commentaries and 
authorities, some, or even one, that you prefer. You 
have found him prevailingly wise, fair, trustworthy. You 
believe in his main propositions, and consider his point of 
view substantially correct. But you will not follow even 
him slavishly, you will hear what others have to say in 
this or that controverted point ; no one man is your sole 
guide. 

You will not deliver yourself over to " Somebody's 
Bible," with references and annotations by some one par- 
ticular man. " Emphasis," someone long ago said, " is 
exposition." " Reference " certainly is. If, starting out 
from any verse of Scripture, you go here and there to 
other passages at the guidance of any one man, trusting 
to his judgment as to its relevancey or connection, you 
are giving yourself into his hands to be molded at his 
will. Who ever made the references in the American 
Standard Revision, there seems to be little individual bias ; 
it looks like a composite authorship, which saves one from 
individual vagaries. There are Reference Bibles, to 
which if you resign yourself, you will be led out to the 
exposition of some particular theory. Rather than put 
yourself into such leading-strings, better discard all 
references, if necessary, and work out your own connec- 
tions, with only a concordance to help you. They may 
be less numerous, less suggestive, less coherent, and they 
certainly will be more laborious, but they will be ** bone 

G 



98 



The Book of Books 



of your bone," " flesh of your flesh," not another man's 
skeleton, but your own. 

Your Bible a Whole Bible 

" Your Own Bible " must be a whole Bible. Every 
part is needed to explain, develop, or balance every other 
part; not of the same absolute value, but needed. If you 
leave anything out, you leave out something which the 
Providence of God put in to make his complete revelation. 
You do not see, just now, just how everything in this 
particular book is related to everything in this other book, 
or even can be made, just now, to furnish you spiritual 
food, but you keep it in " your Bible " against the day 
when something out of it shall shed light on some other 
book or on your spiritual pathway. 

You are not going to trust any other human being to 
pick and choose for you what parts of the Bible are im- 
portant and useful, and what parts are not. Nobody can 
do that for you, for nobody has just your spiritual needs, 
spiritual experience, spiritual digestive power. When, 
according to the story, the Irishman was first given hash, 
he indignantly exclaimed : " Let them ate it that chewed 
it ! " Not only can nobody do this selecting for you, but 
nobody must. By picking out certain words at will Ig- 
natius Donnelly was " able " to find all through the pages 
of Shakespeare the cryptographic assertions by Francis 
Bacon, Lord Verulam, that " brightest, wisest, meanest 
of mankind," that he was the real author. The copies of 
the Declaration of Independence so shaded that as you 
stand off and gaze, you see, not writing, but the face of 
George Washington, could have been so shaded as to 
picture Thomas Jefferson or Benedict Arnold. 



Your Own Bible 99 



Take the Bible, suppress this book as unimportant, dis- 
card this saying as irrelevant, cut out all except certain 
characteristic lines of the man's choosing, and one could 
eliminate every essential thing in the composite picture 
presented by the word of God, and offer to men a mis- 
leading and mocking caricature. 

Without any intentional attempt at such a reshaping 
and misshaping of the Bible, any such partial Bible v^ill 
represent the particular *' sculptor's " mental bias, mental 
affinity, spiritual and intellectual advancement and idio- 
syncrasy. 

You do not want it. You want your own. You want 
one which is the product of your own selective power, as 
led, modified, clarified, illumined, rectified, by the Spirit 
of God himself. You will keep a whole Bible in your 
hands always. You have not a whole Bible yet in head 
and heart, as we shall see in our next chapter. Your own 
Bible will be a mobile Bible, never quite the same at any 
two moments. It will all be there, everything in it from 
Genesis to Revelation will be there, but your part of it at 
that present moment will be just what your study, your 
experience, your advancing insight, under the tuition of 
the Spirit of God, has given you; you and no other; no 
second-hand Bible; as far as you have grasped and 
gripped it, gloriously, emphatically, ineradically, your 
own. 

Questions and Topics 

1. The delights and values of a well-used, personal copy 
of the Bible. 

2. What is " your own Bible '' really ? 

3. What is its value to you ? 



100 The Book of Books 

4. Why do we need help in gaining " our own Bible " ? 

5. What must be the court of final resort ? 

6. How far are we to be guided by others ? 

7. What is the danger of using " Somebody's Bible " ? 

8. The danger of using an " Abridged Bible " ? 

9. Have you a " whole Bible " yet ? 



CHAPTER XV 
AN EXPANDING BIBLE 

" The Bible," with its sixty-six books of so many chap- 
ters, so many verses, so many words, has remained the 
same for something Hke eighteen hundred years. It will 
remain the same, doubtless, forever, for though the Spirit 
of inspiration is not dead, yet no religious subject of 
prime importance to humanity stands in need of more 
light than can be obtained by a diligent study and appli- 
cation of the Bible as we have it, under the guidance of 
that same Holy Spirit. More light may be expected to 
break forth from the Word of God, but not more light 
beyond it or beside it. 

But '' your own Bible " may be expected to, ought to, 
expand indefinitely, just as your own family, town, na- 
tion, may be expected to expand for you, not in outer 
size, perhaps, but in inner meaning and value. 

Not a Dwindling Bible 

Not everyone has had the experience of an expanding 
Bible. To some it has almost seemed to dwindle. In a 
few cases it has vanished away completely. When we 
looked at the Holy Scriptures we looked with awe and 
reverence, almost with dread, as at a vast, awful, majestic 
landscape of mysterious heights and valleys, a treasure- 
house of connected rooms, packed with riches, where the 
foot might wander farther and farther in while the eye 

101 



102 The Book of Books 

dazzled itself with riches. " The Book ! The Book ! " we 
said with bated breath and finger on our lip. 

Then, with a certain degree of superficial familiarity, 
something of the glamour and the vastness disappeared. 
We were beginning to number its books and chapters, 
classify its contents, mark its metes and bounds. The 
immature mind, when it has classified, begins to despise. 
Some portions of it grew so familiar that there were no 
more depths and mysterious treasure-houses remaining. 
We had explored, we thought, every nook and cranny 
of these Scripture rooms. Other parts we " gave up " ; 
they did not yield any meaning to us; they might or 
might not be valuable in the abstract, or to others ; they 
contained nothing for us; we let them alone. If you 
want to know how much your Bible has contracted, not 
from what it really was in itself, or really was to you, but 
from what you " traditionally " thought it to be, go over 
your own particular copy, used for years, and mark the 
vast stretches that are as clean and bright and unmarred 
as the day you got the book; it will reveal as accurately 
and as unmistakably as a stethoscope or skiagraph, the 
degree in which you are suffering from that wasting 
spiritual disease known as " contracted Bible." 

It is said that there are those who have seen their Bible 
contract before their eyes under the malign rays of a 
destructive " criticism/' But that is by no means the 
most prevalent cause of the complaint; it blights those 
who " would not know criticism if they met it in the 
street." And, with a steady head, a sound heart, and a 
living, active faith, there is not much damage that any 
kind of '' criticism " can do to your Bible or to you. You 
might have to change some of your theories about the 



An Expanding Bible 103 

Bible; or you might not; but the Bible itself you will 
not have to throw away; it is God's own self-evidencing 
Word. Keep on studying, living, working, walking with 
Jesus — and you will get back every bit of it that you think 
you have lost. 

The normal thing is to have an expanding Bible. No 
man as yet has had a full-sized one. But he and it ought 
steadily to grow ; and they will grow, together, " with 
equal pace." 

How Expand Your Bible 

One very simple secret and method of an expanding 
Bible is to widen the range of the portion of it with which 
we are familiar. For one reason or another, bad or good, 
but mostly bad, there are many whole books of which we 
individually practically know nothing. When we seek to 
have " our own Bible," and refuse to let any man pick 
and choose for us the Bible around which the coats of our 
mental and spiritual stomachs shall contract and fit them- 
selves, we do well; we must follow our own selective 
power. But we do well also to remember that our own 
selective power is very partial, very faulty, very feeble, and 
we must set ourselves to widen its range, increase its hos- 
pitality, and intensify its energy. Spiritually, very likely, 
" we cannot eat but little meat, our stomach is not good." 
We must get ability to eat more. He who has already 
discovered Isaiah, Matthew, Romans, First John, because 
they " appeal to him," will find that he can grow to a very 
comfortable extent if he will apply himself manfully also 
to Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Ezekiel, John, and Revelation. 
Jehovah has nothing to say against that sort of " adding 
field to field and house to house." 



104 The Book of Books 

Then, as a friend of mine suggests, in those books with 
which we consider ourselves really familiar, it is aston- 
ishing how few of the chapters we have actually made our 
own. We know John's Gospel pretty well; that is, we 
know the first chapter, and the third, and the fourteenth, 
fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth ; but how about the fifth, 
sixth, eleventh, thirteenth? And so with Romans, Cor- 
inthians, and the rest. Any Bible book, the very one you 
know best, is full of unworked " pockets,'' or townships, 
or counties. 

Another rich and fruitful Bible growth comes as pas- 
sages which you had put aside as " hopeless hardheads " 
gradually yield to treatment with advancing and complete 
knowledge and more comprehensive and penetrating re- 
ligious experience. Not all the passages which were once 
intractable will assuredly become " masterable." Some 
are not resoluble, perhaps, by any knowledge which will 
come to us, since the historical setting or allusions are 
lost, but many others will be explained as you get the 
bearing of other scriptures, and as your mind digests 
them more and more, works them over. Still others were 
hard because you had not arrived at that spiritual experi- 
ence which enabled you to understand. You had not 
yet grown sufficiently. 

What could Nicodemus know about the New Birth 
till he had experienced it, or the twelve Ephesian con- 
verts about the " gift of the Holy Spirit " before they 
had received it? How can a child Christian's Bible — 
child in years or in the Christian life — loom up beside the 
Bible of one who has walked with the Master through 
storm and trial and Christian conquest and deepening 
Christian life through sixty years of communion like that 



An Expanding Bible 105 

of John? The secret of an expanding Bible is an ex- 
panding Christian. 

The Process of Interrelation 

The Bible will enlarge and deepen as you relate its 
different books and its different teachings to each other. 
A living, functioning whole is much larger than the sum 
of all its parts. You may know that you have a dead 
body or a dead engine on your hands when the whole is 
equal only to the sum of its parts. If one added not a 
single book, not a single chapter, not a single verse, to 
his Bible knowledge during one whole year, but did gain 
a new sense of their various relations, did begin to see 
the thread, the spinal column, the network of nerves, the 
vitality that throbs in them, he would have a Bible enough 
bigger to pay the largest wages for all his work. 

The Bible expands, of course, when we set it in the 
midst of God's beautiful world of nature which illustrates 
it, and which it makes illustrious. It was not written, as 
Galileo remarked, " to show us how the heavens go, but 
to show us how to go to heaven." We cannot expect it to 
use the latest scientific phrases, or embody the latest 
scientific theories, for those will be antiquated tomorrow, 
while the Bible remains, but it is wonderful how the phys- 
ical pictures of the Testaments, Old and New, and of 
Jesus' sayings especially, light up for us the pages of the 
word. While the land and the book and the sky remain, 
the meaning and glory of it all will glow and grow. 

Still more shall we have an expanding Bible as we 
watch its principles, precepts, and promises exemplified 
in human life. History is a commentary on the Bible; 
the Bible is the clew to history. Each grows as they 



106 The Book of Books 

mutually shed light. Ancient history, outside of Israel^ 
and in it, is simply Romans One and Two writ large. 
Mercantile history, the courts, the market-place, are Prov- 
erbs expanded. Isaiah is at once the soaring wing of 
the best human aspiration and the answering caress of 
God's upper air. A quaint character of recent fiction who 
made each person and event exemplify a Bible saying may 
sometimes have been misled by surface resemblances, but 
he had found a great truth. ^' I read my daily paper to 
see how my heavenly Father is governing the world.'* 
Each day's issue reveals more fully the unerring insight 
of the world, its enlarging application to human life. 

Applying it to our own life is the supreme secret of 
its growth, and ours. He did well who marked every 
promise in his Bible he had tried and proved with " T " 
and '' P." He had a star-studded book. '' Old Dicker- 
man " had his Bible. Every statement he could not 
believe he blotted, till his Bible looked like a book passed 
by a Russian censor. That is not ours ! Each day adds a 
new passage that shines out with God's glory ; each night 
has a new star ; each strurgle records a new promise ; each 
accepted invitation gives out into a new holy of holies, 
till the book blazes with a deepening glory in whose light 
we go on toward the soul's noon ; the path of the right- 
eous that grows more and more unto the perfect day. 

Questions and Topics 

1. Can the Bible itself expand? 

2. Two or three reasons for " contracted Bible." 

3. Need "critical" study cause it? How may such 
effect be avoided? 

4. What is the simplest method of Bible expansion ? 




An Expanding Bible 107 

5. What may make biblical '* hardheads " tractable? 

6. How may inner adjustments expand the Bible? 

7. The aid of geography, science, and history in this. 

8. The supreme secret of a larger Bible. 

9. The penalities of a contracted Bible and the rewards 
of a growing one. 

10. Is there any limit to such Bible expansion? Why? 






